They’re being replaced by Trajan, which has become the go-to font for horror movie posters.” Trajan and Other “Trendy” Typefaces As a result every movie or franchise had it’s own unique identity…. He notes: “If your movie is frightening, disgusting or gory, why not communicate that with moviegoers? That’s what they did during the 1980s. Over on his blog, cinematic type curator Christian Annyas collects some of the better examples of original horror typography. Consider, for example, Dan Perri’s twisted, malevolent on-screen title for A Nightmare on Elm Street, the oddly geometric, Bauhaus-style logo for Sam Raimi’s first Evil Dead movie, or the ‘50s-style, Creature Feature–inspired logo of John Landis’s An American Werewolf in London, each of which is a unique masterwork in horror lettering. The ’80s was a particularly fertile period for original horror typography. If horror movies focusing on the dark, subliminal worlds beneath our day-to-day reality tend to subvert commonly known typefaces, there’s another school of horror type design that aims to make logos every bit as freakishly monstrous as the movies they represent.įrom the original poster for Tod Browning’s 1931 adaptation of Dracula to Saul Bass’s powerful logo for Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, the history of horror branding is dominated by original typography. Here, the typefaces not only stress the role of technology in the film, but again hint at how the paranormal exists in plain sight on the outskirts of our perception, just like the most mundane and ubiquitous fonts. The poster for the 2007 “found footage” horror movie Paranormal Activity uses a combination of Kautiva Bold and Courier Bold to simulate the LED readings on a home video camera, similar to the one that captures evidence of ghosts in the film itself. The subversive horror typography trend continues to this day. The identity primarily uses Helvetica Neue Medium, modified so that the middle descender in the “m” of “Rosemary” forms the ascender in the second “b” of “baby.” By linking the two letters together, the designers create a glyph that resembles both an umbilical cord and the mobile dangling above a crib, while hinting at the hellish netherworld of Satan worshipping which - spoilers! - will, by the end of the film, swallow up both Rosemary and her baby. Perhaps the most common type of horror typography, the subversive school of font design employs familiar typefaces to hint at what lurks beneath the surface world of normality.Ī good example is the poster of Roman Polanski’s 1968 adaptation of Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby.
They generally fall into three categories: “normal” typefaces used subversively, original typography used to emphasize the shocking and bizarre, and, well, Trajan. With ascenders made of bones and descenders of dripping blood, they come across as more tacky than scary, better suited for a flyer for a grade-school Halloween party than the latest horror movie blockbuster or Stephen King cover.īut there are trends in horror typography, especially in cinema. When you Google up “scary fonts” or “horror typefaces,” what comes back is a grab bag of obscure novelty fonts with names like Hollyweird and Gargoonies. It’s a surprisingly difficult question to answer. But what about horror? Can a font be scary? And if so, what - and more important, where - are the great horror fonts?
Typefaces are called upon by designers to instill all sorts of characteristics in text.
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