Film Poster Analysis - Hide and Seek

The film title ‘Hide and Seek’ suggests different meanings, but none towards the psychological thriller/horror section. It suggests a game to take place in this film. The main image to this film raises questions about the film as we can see a characters body halfway through the door, this leaves us a mystery to who it is and what it will do, is makes us believe that there is maybe something supernatural, it creates a code of enigma. This poster employs iconography of a particular type of genre, it suggests just one genre, and it suggests that the film may be a psychological thriller. This is evident due to the lack of blood on screen and the main image showing us something mysterious behind the door.

The film stars are Robert Deniro and Dakota Fanning. This poster doesn’t show the stars, but they are presented through text which is of a relatively large size, this is a unique selling point as these two actors are relatively well-known for acting in other big films. The tag-line for this film is ‘Come out come out whatever you are’ and is of a very large text size which stands out significantly. This suggests a massive twist to your ordinary game of hide and seeks as the stereotypical thing to say is ‘wherever you are’ not ‘whatever you are’. This suggests that there may be something supernatural or someone unknown as the key to this plot, this creates a code of enigma.

The credits on this film poster are very small; this may be because the director or producers are not relatively well known. Although the release date is put into a different colour font to make it stand out more than the people involved in the making of the film.

There are many different experiences of pleasure being offered to the audiences, the audience feel scared because the image on the poster makes it look like it’s your point of view. The target audience for this poster appears to be 16-35 of a mixed gender; this is evident as there are no main characters shown on the poster to attract a specific gender to watch the film.