Zombies and Graphic Design - My Choice for Contemporary Graphic Design

Dawn of the Dead (1978)

I've been obsessed with zombie films since I was about ten...just look at my movie collection and you'll see a envy worthy assortment of blood, guts, gore and the undead.  Few of them really have cool posters associated with them, at least not in the sense of a design. Most of them have the run-of-the-mill cheesy illustration of the walking dead or the heroes on the cover. One however has always stood apart from the others....so much so that I keep a poster of it on my wall

George Romero's original Dawn of the Dead was in my opinion the most cerebral of the initial "Dead" trilogy and worked very clever social commentary into the fabric of the film, but I'm going to stop myself from distracting myself with my own film geekery. My point is this: It is very appropriate that it has the most subtle and intelligent of the posters designs in the series

Its main element is a sense of continuation used to draw the viewer closer the the perceived threat of the poster, a stylized eyes only portrait of a zombie (within the film no less ). The wounding adds a touch of asymmetry to what would almost be a very logical and symmetrical design from its center alignment and corresponds to the different red hues throughout the poster. This lends a bit more to the feeling of unease to the  whole piece.

For a horror poster, this image uses very subtle tools to convey the feeling of dread and foreboding  that Romero and the other filmmakers wanted to portray in the film