Thriller Poster Research

A high contrast poster with little colour variation. The edges of the character's body are either solid black or white, resulting in a striking silhouette. Additional information about the film is revealed throughout the use of overlays, in this case, a woman's face.

The poster for The Next Three Days is reminiscent of older thriller movie posters, such as an Alfred Hitchcock's North By Northwest and Vertigo, combining the more recent blue graded, high contrast visual style with classic iconography.

When researching thriller posters, it became clear that a very popular convention is to show a protagonist's face in a mid or close up, and use overlay effects to super impose a scene from the film into the image. The thriller posters shown here also use few distinctive colours and high contrast, with a few even opting for a two tone colour scheme. Typically, images seem to have a blue overlay. On most of the thriller posters I've encountered in my research, block capitals are used on almost all of the text to ensure that it is clearly visible. My favourite poster I have encountered during my research is the following for the thriller Identity, as it is much more imaginative in it's use of shape and contrast, providing more information to a viewer without using obvious superimpositions, which are used in most of the other posters.