Sweet Sin Design

August has been unoffically my month of horror movies for the past 10 years. It started really because I needed to find a place to have AC to beat the summer heat, which was a friend of mine down the street. She always had a crazy collection of movies and I found myself drawn to watching horror movies. That went on for several years before I moved apartment. So I continued the tradition.

This year, I decided to that I shouldn’t spend every night just Netflixing horror movies but instead, design type posters for each of the movies I watch.

The Dunwich Horror

http://instagram.com/p/55ckhcR-r8
This type was inspired by the symbol on the staff that Grandfather Whateley carries around. I used the Mostra Nuova font since I love the single slab size throughout the font. The interesting part was being able to make text look like abstract art.
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Honeymoon

http://instagram.com/p/565u1OR-vC
Honeymoon was about a woman who was slowly taken over by “dark creatures” or aliens. There were these high beam lights that flickered through the cabin that inspired the long shadow in the design. I used basic Helvetica Neue font and slowly deleted pieces to emphasize the concept of “losing” the female lead character as the story progressed.
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Oculus

http://instagram.com/p/58dLKvR-uF
The movie was interesting how they played with the past and present, merging and dividing them. I really wanted to keep that whole reflection of past and present being tied down by this mirror. I created the type by using a rounded rectangle with thin slabs for horizontal bar.
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Here Comes the Devil

http://instagram.com/p/5-4x22R-ku
The font in this poster is a DIN Condensed. It’s the same size font for Devil but I adjusted height after creating shape to avoid mismatch slab sizes when increasing font size. Since the movie takes place in this cave in a hill, I wanted to keep the gritty feel and used the letter “L” to finish off with a devil’s tail.
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The Silence of The Lamb

http://instagram.com/p/6Bgh0Zx-u4
I’ve been wanting to watch this movie for a long time. I don’t really consider it a horror but more thriller and gore but Netflix considers it horror. I decided to use the font, Pacioli, for the ideal divine proportion. I cropped part of the font to intentionally talk about the nature of people being hidden. I added the use of splatter in the background to look like a butterfly but it can also be interpreted as a psych Rorschach Test.
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The Host

http://instagram.com/p/6EFuYBx-jK
This movie was a bit funny, sad, heartbreaking, angry, and too long, much like the director’s other movie, Snowpiercer. I wanted to play with creating type in water and worked on a tutorial I saw. The font is Impact. I wanted that effect of falling through water since the creature in the movie comes from the water.
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We Are What We Are

http://instagram.com/p/6HqszRR-sj
This movie was slow and took me by surprise by how good it was. It takes place in the woods of New York where this family are ritualistically cannabils. They are stuck in traditions that they can’t escape from it. So I wanted to create a pattern out of the first letters, WAWWA, but ended up using it as a background like a 70’s wallpaper. I set the “cannibal” mood with gradients of black and red.
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The Lost Boys

http://instagram.com/p/6Lo_OBx-lV
After watching this movie, I still don’t see the hype. It might be the fact that I didn’t watch this as a teenager. It was a bit cheesy. I find most vampire movies a bit cheesy and often over romanticized. So I made the type rather comic-like, playing on the fangs and stake to create the text. This work was actually done on my iPad with the app called iDraw which does great vector illustration.
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American Mary

http://instagram.com/p/6NCsWLR-mq
The movie had a great story despite the often uneven acting. I was a bit tired from traveling and didn’t get much a good sense direction of where I wanted to go with this type. I ended up using Interstate as the base font and Californya as the top. As for the word Mary, I created stitches on top of the Interstate font since the female lead is a surgeon.
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American Psycho

http://instagram.com/p/6PZbNOR-jS
I worked on two versions of this before I settled with this one. I used the American flag color to help create the tone. The font here is Futura for the nice rounded O and the sharp A. It was a simple piece allowing the dripping texture to be the most emphasis.
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You’re Next

http://instagram.com/p/6R8ZcTR-gs
I’m a big fan of Ti West movies so when I searched his name, this movie came up. He only had a small role but his friend from ABC’s of Death directed this movie. I loved the badass female lead. For the type, I used a distressed font and created shapes to break them in order to recreate the broken glass effect seen through a lot of the movie sequence.
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The Town That Dreaded Sundown

http://instagram.com/p/6Uh930R-tE
This movie was horrible. I could barely get through it. It was a remake of a 70’s film so for the type design, I made it look a bit retro with double gradients in the background and in the text. I played with the type Didot and its layout sizing to create a dramatic atmosphere.
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An American Ghost Story

http://instagram.com/p/6XF_MTR-nB
This was another rotten movie. It was low budget with lots of cliches moment throughout the story. I had to watch it on mute. I played with the background more than the text here, since I kept the text looking very “law & order-like” by using Goudy.
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Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead

http://instagram.com/p/6Z8LDSR-h7
Finally, a good movie after a few bad ones. This featured aborigines! WHAT?! A movie with minorities? And a bad ass female lead who’s just super kickass? I don’t dig zombie movies but this one rocked! (Though there were some loopholes and unexplained things). I loved playing with the type here since the letter combination allowed for a more interesting text shape with the W’s, M’s, and Y’s. The second half of the text uses DIN but with distressed cutouts.
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A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night

http://instagram.com/p/6cgygjx-un
At first, I didn’t know what I was watching except that it was in Farsi. Turns out, it was a super hipster Iranian film that actually takes place in California but made to be like a wild west called “Bad City” where the bad creature is a vigilante. Vampire: checked. Vinyl Records: checked. James Dean haircut: checked. Hipster music: checked. For this, I used a brush font inside the cutout shape of a girl in a full Burqa. I was told that prostitution, drugs, and STD’s are quite a big thing in Iran but is ignored or talked about by the government. I felt this movie was a socially commentary on that topic.
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Leprechaun

http://instagram.com/p/6fBC5px-lP
Late 80s and 90s horror movies always feels a bit cheesy. This one was incredibly cheesy. I mean, come on, a leprechaun? For the design, I kept the cheesy feel with the green glow and played with the layout of the font, Trajan.
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Horns

http://instagram.com/p/6hkrfeR-ji
This design was a lot of fun. I had the idea on the train ride to work and sketched out a few horns before setting to Illustrator and free form drawing with the brush tool. There were no specific font since I really tried to incorporate text into the overall drawing.
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The House At The End of Time

http://instagram.com/p/6kNt4oR-lP
This was a GREAT movie. Must-see if you love horror films. Creepy, scary, but humanistic, sentimental, and even touching. For this design, I chose Trajan font again but worked on incorporating lines thoruughout the font. The movie deals with choices we make and the paths that our lives take by choices we make. So I wanted to add that little touch into the design.
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Kill Zombie!

http://instagram.com/p/6mr8qPR-iC
I find watching foreign movies, I get to see more diversity on screen instead of the typical run-of-the-mill in Hollywood. Though it wasn’t a great film, it was fun to watch. For the type design, I used Futura Condensed Bold and sliced them with splatters. I wanted that Kill Bill look since the movie was rather stylized in a comedic video game sort of way.
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The Road

http://instagram.com/p/6pRlRoR-uA
This was another foreign horror film, but from Philippines so not to be confused with the post-apocalyptic one with Viggo Mortensen. This one was about children who go on a ride and get lost on a road and are killed. For the type, I used Oswald Outline and worked in some tire marks.
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Big Ass Spider!

http://instagram.com/p/6r3Tpbx-h9
From the people who brought you Sharknado…well, it really felt like it. Silly and stupid, at least I got into creating the fun spider shape where the words formed the spider’s infamous backside. For the other font, I used DIN.
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The Ward

http://instagram.com/p/6u9PLRR-kg
For a John Caprenter film that is only an hour and a half, this felt like a two hour movie. At the end, it was all about split personality. So for the font, I used Caslon and broke them up like mirrors.
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Housebound

http://instagram.com/p/6xPdmxR-iU
This was such a fun, scary, and interesting movie, which I really loved. For the type design, I wanted something that was fun and interesting and interconnecting because the story was all about being stuck inside the house. So I created a single stroke for all the letters and rounded the ends to keep the rounded consistency in the style.
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Hell

http://instagram.com/p/6zo2aRR-hk
I love disaster films. This had such a great premise. But like many disaster films, it was a bit too slow and ended pretty cliche. I used Arial Black to create the base font and worked on creating a “heated” smoke like a mirage in the desert.
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Argento’s Dracula

http://instagram.com/p/62MuoWR-rA
I keep thinking I would like Dracula but I really still don’t like the story. Whether it’s Coppola or Argento, I find the story cheesy. For the type design, I went the traditional route looking for a gothic font. Here, I used Google’s Unifraktur Maguntia and added some flourishes.
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The Guest

http://instagram.com/p/64v8Adx-qn
I’m a fan of Ti West and Adam Wingard so this movie was great to see and it was nice to see Matthew Crawley out of the Edwardian costumes into this ripped hot American ex-soldier. The movie was really good in the beginning but the story seemed to unravel to pieces by the end. For the design of the poster, I played with the idea of light entering an ajarred door. The type and even the illustration was how light would cast on the edge of an object.
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The Dead Zone

http://instagram.com/p/67YQGDx-t9
What is a horror month without a Stephen King? THe Dead Zone didn’t feel like a horror to me though. But for the type design, I kept it simple with DIN font and used the transform tool to distort the text. I also learn that there’s no such thing as gradual blur in Illustrator. I had to do a few steps to make it look gradual.
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A Place of One’s Own

http://instagram.com/p/69y5T2R-vo
For a black and white classic from the Brits, this film was before its time, questioning possession and a form of exorcism, albeit in the romantic sort of way. I’m surprised I hadn’t used Bodoni, one of my favorite fonts. I used it to create an iron gate.
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Stonehearst Asylum

http://instagram.com/p/7A3G5_R-ic
I typically like Edgar Allen Poe’s stories but all the movies I’ve seen so far that were inspired or about him have been a disasspointment. So for the design, instead of creating a metal sign, I decided to go for the stone engraving look, using Trajan font and first time using Illustrator’s envelope distort tool. All the flourishes were done by vector illustration.
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Patrick

http://instagram.com/p/7B4G6lR-t3
The last movie of the month hails from Australia. Despite the 1 star review on Netflix, I enjoyed watching this movie. It was dark and slow and a bit deranged. I worked on incorporating medical stats into the design but tried not to copy too much of the design already used. I used Futura font again for this one.
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