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Before the trailer, before the reviews, there was a sheet of paper in a glass case outside the theater, and it had one job: make you afraid of something you hadn’t seen yet. The best horror posters are tiny horror films. A few of them are better than the movies they were selling.
This list was inspired by Empire’s ranking of the greatest movie posters of all time, which is worth your evening. We narrowed it to the season we’re in: horror, monsters and a few posters that are only spooky by a technicality. Every one is credited to the person who made it, where that person is known. Nobody knows who painted the most expensive one.
Each entry ends with a Look for, one detail worth finding before you scroll on. Jump straight to any poster below, or start at 31 and work your way down to the one that shows you nothing at all.
Only two of our top ten show you the monster
Go back through the ten best posters here and count the monsters. You’ll find a shark and a vampire. Everything else is a hand, a shadow, an egg, a pram, a word with a crack in it. The movies had budgets for rubber suits. The posters had a better idea: the scariest thing is the one you fill in yourself.
Part one
31 to 21: The Late Show
Drive-in promises, a box you should not open, one Polish nightmare and the most expensive poster nobody can credit.
31The Fly 1986
Seven words did more for this poster than any painting could. “Be afraid. Be very afraid.” is adapted from a line Geena Davis says in the film, and the campaign carried it out into the world, where it has lived as a catchphrase ever since, mostly in office emails about budget season.
Richard Mahon painted the art for B.D. Fox Independent, one of the busiest poster shops of the era. But it is the tagline that stuck, and few films can say their poster gave the language a new phrase.
Look for: the tagline. Then try to remember the last time you heard it used about anything with wings.
30The Babadook 2014
This poster borrows its whole visual language from a prop. Illustrator and paper engineer Alex Juhasz designed both the monster and the pop-up book at the center of Jennifer Kent’s film, drawing every page by hand and engineering it to fold open on camera.
The US poster keeps that scratchy, childlike hand: a dark figure on a beige ground that looks like it fell off a nursery shelf. In the UK, the campaign leaned all the way in, with figures that pop up off the page.
Look for: the top hat and the long claw fingers, drawn as if by a careful, frightened child.
29Frankenstein 2025
Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein got a stack of posters, and the one people kept passing around was James Jean’s IMAX edition. Jean wove the film into the anatomical prints of Jacques-Fabien Gautier-Dagoty, the 18th century engraver whose color plates open the human body like a book.
The result reads less like an advertisement and more like something kept in the back room of a medical library. It was revealed on Hideo Kojima’s Instagram, of all places, and Creative Review counted it among the best posters of the year.
Look for: the seam where the old engraving ends and the new film begins. It’s hard to find.
28Dziecko Rosemary (Rosemary’s Baby, Poland) 1984
Rosemary’s Baby didn’t reach Polish cinemas until 1984, sixteen years late, and the Polish poster school had no interest in repeating Hollywood’s answer. Andrzej Pągowski’s version is a woman’s hand gripping a small, grotesque claw. That’s the entire poster.
Polish film posters of that era were commissioned from artists, not marketing departments, and the artists were free to interpret rather than sell. It’s why so many of them feel like the film’s bad dream instead of its trailer. (You’ll meet another one in our top ten.)
Look for: who is holding whom.
27Ghostbusters 1984
Spooky rather than scary, and in October that counts. The teaser had an unusual problem: Columbia didn’t own the name Ghostbusters yet (Filmation did, from its own TV show), so the first poster carried only the logo and a promise that something was coming to save the world that summer.
A logo had to do a title’s job, and it did. The no-ghost sign started in Aykroyd’s script, Michael C. Gross art directed it and Brent Boates drew the final version. People have argued over who deserves the credit for forty years, which is about the best review a logo can get.
Look for: the missing word. The poster never needed it.
26Gremlins 1984
John Alvin painted a box. Someone holds it, light leaks out of the air holes, and the whole movie is right there: something adorable is inside, and you should absolutely not open it.
Gremlins was an Amblin picture, and Alvin hid a tiny salute to the house. A button on the jeans of whoever is holding the box shows Elliott and E.T. biking across the moon. The film opened the same day as Ghostbusters, and the uproar over its violence (along with Temple of Doom’s) helped bring in the PG-13 rating that summer.
Look for: the little button, between the bottom of the box and the title.
25Weapons 2025
Most of this poster is a paragraph. It tells you, flatly, that at 2:17 in the morning every child from one classroom got out of bed, walked out the front door into the dark and never came back. Below it, small silhouettes of children run with their arms held out.
Reading a horror poster turns out to be worse than looking at one. The campaign kept the dread going with an unlisted, roughly two hour “surveillance” video of children running, and a later poster of ordinary objects (a bell, a soup can, a bonsai) warning that harmless things can hurt you.
Look for: the arms. Every child holds them exactly the same way.
24Midsommar 2019
Horror in full sun. Florence Pugh’s tear-streaked face sits inside a crown of flowers, and the whole sheet is warm, saturated and bright, which might be the most unsettling choice a horror poster can make. The payoff poster won a Silver Clio.
A24 also commissioned artist prints for the film, including Yuko Higuchi’s psychedelic flowers that grow eyeballs. Those are worth looking up.
Look for: how much light there is. Nowhere to hide.
23Cat People 1942
Val Lewton’s film is famous for everything it refuses to show: shadows, footsteps, a bus whose brakes hiss like a cat. William Rose’s poster ignored all of that and gave RKO a panther looming over a glamorous woman in a strapless gown.
It’s the opposite of the movie, and it’s terrific. Film historians Stephen Rebello and Richard Allen put Rose’s posters for Lewton among the best of the period, in the same breath as Universal’s.
Look for: everything the film itself decided you’d never see.
22House on Haunted Hill 1959
Reynold Brown painted the drive-in era’s biggest promises, and this one promises a lot: a giant skeleton carrying a woman in a negligee, a victim reaching up out of a trapdoor, Vincent Price with a candlestick, and a four storey mansion that looks nothing like the house in the movie.
William Castle backed the poster up with “Emergo,” a plastic skeleton flown over the audience on a wire in the theaters that installed it. A near-mint copy sold at Heritage in May 2025 for $4,500, a bargain next to the Universal posters further up this list.
Look for: the hand coming up through the trapdoor, bottom left.
21Dracula 1931
In November 2017 a Dracula one-sheet sold at Heritage Auctions for $525,800, at the time the most anyone had paid for a movie poster. It is one of two known copies, and it had stayed with one family since the 1950s.
Nobody knows who painted it. Universal’s posters came out of a studio art department and went unsigned, which is why a poster can set a world record while its artist stays anonymous. Heritage noted it’s one of only two styles that show Bela Lugosi as he actually looked.
Look for: Lugosi himself, rendered straight rather than as a cartoon ghoul.
Part two
20 to 11: Lights Down
Painted posters are back, a 1920 lithograph still looks like the future, and Drew Struzan pulls an all-nighter.
20Hereditary 2018
Ari Aster’s film opens by drifting into one of the mother’s miniature rooms, and Gravillis built the poster from that idea: the family house as a cutaway dollhouse floating in black, its rooms lit and open like a diorama.
You look into it the way something in the film is looking in. The tagline does the rest: every family tree hides a secret.
Look for: the small, treelike sigil above the title. You’ll want to know what it means. You won’t like it.
19Us 2019
Two posters, both brilliant. The teaser was a Rorschach inkblot that resolves into two faces looking at each other, the whole film as a psych test. Then came the one-sheet: a red sleeve, a single leather glove and a pair of gold scissors, under an almost romantic cursive title.
That gold scissors sheet won a Silver Clio, and the wider campaign took a Grand Clio. Jordan Peele’s films have had some of the best marketing in horror, and Lindeman Associates was behind a lot of it.
Look for: the cursive. It’s lovely. That’s the problem.
18The Witch 2015
Styled THE VVITCH, with two Vs standing in for the W the way old printers set it, and that single typographic choice puts you in 1630s New England before you see a frame.
Gravillis paired two posters: Black Phillip the goat rising out of total darkness at the bottom of the frame, and a raven, which A24 released on a Friday the 13th. Almost all of each poster is black. Nothing is wasted, and nothing is explained.
Look for: the empty dark above the goat. Most of the poster is nothing, on purpose.
17Longlegs 2024
NEON’s campaign treated the audience like detectives. Posters arrived as case files: a snowy house with a police report date of January 13, 1974, a covered pile of bodies labeled as the Horn family. A half page cipher ran in the Seattle Times, signed as if the killer had paid for it. Billboards in Los Angeles listed a phone number that played Nicolas Cage threatening whoever called.
GrandSon’s key art holds it together: a bold red title with deliberately wrong kerning, and a tiny figure in a red coat against a pale, washed-out house. The campaign won five Clio awards, including Integrated Campaign.
Look for: the gaps between the letters. Something is off, and you can’t stop checking.
16The Evil Dead (UK quad) 1982
Graham Humphreys was paid £300 and painted this in about three days, working from four black and white stills after a screening at London’s Scala cinema. He chose cheap watercolor paper on purpose, for its rough, worn texture, because the painting would only ever be photographed for print.
He hand-painted the lettering on separate strips, and he checked the moon’s craters against a photograph, because if you’re going to paint a demon you might as well get the moon right.
Look for: the reel-to-reel tape machine in the middle. Its play head is a skull.
15A Nightmare on Elm Street 1984
Matthew Peak was 25, just out of art school, and this was his first movie poster. The brief from the agency was simply a girl sleeping with monsters in her head. He painted it in opaque watercolor over a pencil sketch and showed it to New Line’s Bob Shaye at midnight, which feels right.
Peak’s father was Bob Peak, who painted Apocalypse Now. The son went on to paint the next four Elm Street posters, but the first is the best, because Freddy barely appears in it.
Look for: the glove. That’s all the monster you get.
14It Follows 2014
If you need proof the painted poster is back, here it is. Akiko Stehrenberger painted Maika Monroe’s wide eyes in a car’s rear-view mirror, a red-nailed hand adjusting it, under a retro red brush-script title that looks lifted from a 1980s VHS box.
Stehrenberger made her name with the Funny Games poster in 2007, and she typically works up five to eight thumbnail sketches before painting the final. The mirror is a perfect choice here. In It Follows, the thing is always behind you, walking.
Look for: the mirror. It’s the only window in the poster, and it points backward.
13The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari 1920
The posters were on the streets of Berlin before the film was finished, many carrying a cryptic order: Du musst Caligari werden! You must become Caligari! Nobody knew what it meant, which was exactly the idea.
MoMA owns a copy of this lithograph and has shown it in four exhibitions, from a film poster survey in 1960 to its Weimar Cinema show in 2010. Over a century later it still looks more like modern art than marketing.
Look for: how little it resembles a 1920 advertisement. That was the point.
12The Mummy 1932
For seventeen years this was the most expensive movie poster in the world. Sotheby’s sold a copy in March 1997 for $453,500. Only about three are believed to survive, and Metallica’s Kirk Hammett owns one. When that 1997 copy came back to auction in 2018 with an estimate of $1 to $1.5 million, the bidding stalled short of the minimum and it went home unsold.
Karoly Grosz ran Universal’s poster department, and as with most studio work of the era he gets the credit rather than a signature. What makes this one sing is how crowded it is: bright color pushed to the edges, almost no breathing room, which was unusual for a 1932 poster.
Look for: the white space. There almost isn’t any.
11The Thing 1982
In the spring of 1982 Universal called Drew Struzan and asked for a painting by the next morning. He had no stills, no actors and no creature to look at, so he posed for it himself in his own parka and gloves while his wife, Dylan, developed the reference photos in their laundry room. He painted all day and through the night.
A studio driver waited about an hour while he finished, and the paint was reportedly still wet on the hundred mile drive from Lake Arrowhead to Los Angeles. We’ve written about Struzan’s larger than life career before. This might be the best thing he ever painted in a single night.
Look for: the hood. Light blasts out where a face should be.
Part three
10 to 1: Don’t Look Behind You
The ten best horror posters ever made. Notice how little most of them show you.
10Nosferatu 1922
Albin Grau co-founded the studio that made Nosferatu, practiced the occult, and designed the film’s sets, costumes and posters himself. He also staged the premiere as a society evening called the Festival of Nosferatu, and asked guests to arrive in period costume.
Critic John Coulthart points out that Grau’s posters are more Expressionist than the film, and hint at an Orlok even worse than the one onscreen. A century later, the posters for Robert Eggers’ 2024 remake kept Orlok in shadow and leaned on his long fingers, a straight line back to Grau.
Look for: the fingers. Then go look at the 2024 posters and find them again.
9Ptaki (The Birds, Poland) mid-1960s
Hitchcock’s The Birds, through the Polish poster school. Bronisław Zelek repeated the word ptaki in stencilled, mismatched letters so the type itself flocks, converging on a skull-winged figure above an empty band. It was his debut at the Warsaw International Poster Biennale, it’s one of the few Polish posters in MoMA’s collection, and in 2017 Junya Watanabe printed it onto clothes for Comme des Garçons.
Meanwhile in America, Universal’s tagline announced that “The Birds is coming!” A third grade class in New York wrote to Hitchcock in March 1963 to correct his grammar. We love them for it!
Look for: the letters. They are the birds.
8The Silence of the Lambs 1991
The moth was a real specimen, rented from the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. Jonathan Demme asked for a nod to Philippe Halsman’s 1951 photograph In Voluptas Mors, in which seven nude women form a skull beside Salvador Dalí, so the skull on the moth’s back was built from that image.
The ratings board wouldn’t allow the nudes, so the campaign hired models in bodysuits to restage the skull. Dawn Baillie, art director at Dazu, ended up finishing it largely on her own.
Look for: the skull on the moth’s back. Get close. It’s made of people.
7Psycho 1960
Tony Palladino designed the jacket for Robert Bloch’s novel in 1959, with the white letters of PSYCHO torn apart. Hitchcock hired him to carry the idea into the film’s lettering and advertising, and insisted the word dominate the campaign, with only small photos of the stars. Palladino later said the title was so descriptive he simply let the word be the picture.
According to AIGA’s Eye on Design, he was paid about $5,000, a little less than Bloch got for the film rights. Saul Bass then took the broken type and put it in motion for the opening titles. Bass gets most of the credit. Palladino had the idea.
Look for: the crack running through the letters, like a ransom note torn down the middle.
6Jaws 1975
It started as a book cover. Paul Bacon painted a shark rising toward a swimmer for the hardcover, and Roger Kastel repainted the idea in oil for the 1974 Bantam paperback. His swimmer was a model from a Good Housekeeping shoot, balanced on a stool doing the front crawl, and he studied the stuffed sharks at the American Museum of Natural History to get the jaw right.
Universal added sea foam to cover the swimmer’s nudity and turned the title red. Then Kastel’s original painting disappeared after a mid-1970s show in New York, and he never learned whether it was stolen or lost in a studio warehouse. It’s a summer movie, sure. It’s also on every October rewatch list we know.
Look for: the scale. A tiny swimmer, an enormous mouth, and nothing between them but dark water.
5The Exorcist 1973
Warner Bros. and William Friedkin banned two things from the campaign: any image of the possessed girl, and any religious imagery. Bill Gold, who also made the poster for Casablanca, tried a bedroom door left ajar and a sweet family snapshot of Linda Blair before landing on a single still: Father Merrin arriving at the house at night.
Gold simplified it to a silhouette under a streetlamp, caught in a hard beam of light from an upstairs window. The shot itself was Friedkin’s nod to René Magritte’s Empire of Light, which he had seen at MoMA. Gold’s poster turned it into the most famous arrival in horror.
Look for: where the light is coming from. Her window.
4Rosemary’s Baby 1968
Mia Farrow’s huge, sickly green profile, and below it a tiny black pram on a rocky crag, photographed on the rock outcrops of Central Park. The scene never happens in the film. Then four words: Pray for Rosemary’s Baby.
Producer Robert Evans recalled that Stephen Frankfurt’s agency charged $100,000 for the campaign, and that Paramount’s chief grumbled about paying that much for a handful of words. They were worth every cent. Hold on to the name Philip Gips. He’s about to come back.
Look for: the pram. It’s barely there.
3The Shining 1980
Saul Bass and Stanley Kubrick went back and forth for a long time on this one, with Bass reportedly producing more than 300 versions. Kubrick wrote his verdicts by hand on the rejects: hard to read even at this size, the hotel looks too sprawling, looks like a science fiction film. Bass signed one of his cover letters with a doodle of his own head on a bass fish.
The poster they landed on is almost nothing: a bright yellow field and a small, barely human face set into the lettering. It’s yellow! For a horror film! And it is still the strangest, most unforgettable thing on this list.
Look for: the face in the lettering. Once you find it, you can’t unsee it.
2Halloween 1978
Bob Gleason’s idea was a kitchen knife whose echoing shapes also form the face of a jack-o’-lantern. The design firm turned it down and asked for the mask instead, then called him back about three days later. He painted it in acrylic on illustration board in three or four days, and it became the defining image of the season it’s named after.
Somewhere along the way the back of the hand was painted over. Gleason cleaned off the overpaint before the original sold at Heritage in 2016 for $83,650, and he has said he never meant to paint what people now find hiding in the knuckles.
Look for: the knuckles of the hand holding the knife. There’s a screaming face in there.
1Alien 1979
Fox first hired Bill Gold, whose rejected version showed a red-lit screaming face with the eyes torn away to reveal space. Philip Gips and Stephen Frankfurt went the other way. An egg. A hairline crack leaking green light. A ribbed, gridded ground below, a title in widely spaced letters, and one line at the bottom: In space no one can hear you scream.
Barbara Gips wrote that line (the stories about where it came to her vary), and her husband Philip designed the sheet with Frankfurt, the same pair behind Rosemary’s Baby at No. 4. The poster shows you nothing at all. It’s the best horror poster ever made.
Look for: the crack. It’s the only thing happening, and it’s enough.
Part four
Honorable Mentions
Thirty-one is a hard limit, and a few cut us deeply. Marcus Silversides’ painted UK quad for Hellraiser (1987). John Alvin’s The Lost Boys (1987). Jakub Erol’s Polish Obcy (Alien, 1980), proof that even our No. 1 could be reimagined. The Cabin in the Woods (2012), its cabin twisted like a Rubik’s cube to tell you the film is a puzzle. Tansy Myer’s illustrated key art for Sinners (2025), which won the Golden Trailer Award for Most Original Poster.
And London After Midnight (1927), a lost film that survives mostly in stills and in one known copy of its sepia one-sheet, which sold at Heritage in 2014 for $478,000. For a few years it was the most valuable movie poster on Earth, advertising a movie nobody can watch.
The Mondo effect
Somewhere along the way studios swapped painters for photo composites, and fans built the painted poster a second home. Mondo started in 2004 as an offshoot of Austin’s Alamo Drafthouse, commissioning artists to make screen-printed posters for films old and new, hand mixed, numbered and never reprinted. Drops sold out in minutes. Olly Moss made an Evil Dead, Tyler Stout made a The Thing that many collectors still call the quintessential Mondo print, and Phantom City Creative made an Escher-inspired Cabin in the Woods that the director loved. The alternative poster isn’t much of an alternative anymore, and you can see its fingerprints all over the painted posters further up this list.
The End
Or is it?
Keep exploring
If this sent you down the rabbit hole, the Harry Ransom Center put 5,000 vintage movie posters online for free, and we’ve written about the art of the minimalist movie poster and children’s board games reimagined as horror posters. Need something to actually watch? Start with the best reviewed Halloween movies of all time or our list of vintage scary movies.
And if you’d rather your October came home with you, the shop has gone a little bit strange for the season: candles that burn down to a skeleton, a tarot candle named for Death, and a four inch Zoltar who tells better fortunes than most of the people we know. See the Halloween shelf.
