Alien Day may be in the past now, but that doesn’t mean we can’t continue the celebration of alien-themed films. Today’s horror poster comes from the 1980 film Without Warning, a science fiction tale about a Vietnam war veteran (Martin Landau) and a couple of teenagers battling evil space aliens in California. Now there’s obviously a lot of cheese in the film itself – its alien designs aren’t the best – but the film has two posters that make it look like a much better movie than it really is.
We’ll start with the poster above, which I find the more successful of the two. While it does use the very common procedure of highlighting protagonists within the silhouette of the film’s monster (see: Friday the 13th, released only four months prior to this film), the effort is strikingly impressive – the vibrant reds emanating from the alien itself, the shadowed skull-like visage, and the desperation of the campers trapped within that figure all help to paint a vivid picture of what Without Warning could have been. The alien even has some blood dripping from its claws if you look closely.
This second poster isn’t as good, but there’s one thing specifically that I like about it. Notice that the shadowing on the woman’s face isn’t very good, but the artist clearly spent a lot of time detailing the obscenely massive boobs. That’s the kind of artist you want working on your horror film.
