Poster Analysis

The Purge Poster Analysis

The main focus in The Purge  poster, is the main image of the masked face.
We can see that the image is a mask because though it's very realistic, there are clear eye holes for the person to see through, and we can differentiate between the real eye and the rest of the mask. The mask also has a painted effect, rather than the image looking purely photographic. The mask has a menacing grin designed to unsettled the victim, and in this case unsettle the viewer of the poster. Masks are synonymous in horror films, as they are an iconic way of hiding a person's identity, usually meaning that the person is hiding their identity because they have sinister intentions. Here the mask creates the code of enigma, who is taking part in the purge? Why don't they want to show their faces?
The title of the film is in a plain , simple white font, featured in capital letters. All of the text appears in the same block font, almost as if it's official, showing that it's to be taken seriously. This is more effective opposed to a more creative style which might reflect a fantasy film or supernatural horror. The poster's simplicity works well as the straight-to-the point text almost reflects a news warning. This is used to emphasise seriousness and reality, if it appeared too fictional it probably would not scare the audience. The definition of purge is to "rid someone of an unwanted feeling, memory, or condition." This combined with the tagline will make the audience wonder if the purge is about getting rid of evil, aggression, negative feelings on the night where "all crime is legal."

Below is the second promotional poster for The Purge, displaying that the filmmakers wanted to create the effect of a real event taking place. This was placed predominantly in public transport areas, e.g. the Underground, so gained quite a large amount of attention from passers-by who are used to seeing genuine warnings about Public Services. Publicising the Purge as a real thing makes the concept far more unsettling, as it becomes even worse if we imagine "a night where all crime is legal" in our own present-day society.

The tagline on the original poster is, "One night a year, all crime is legal." This is a self-explanatory statement, but the concept itself is original and unusual. The idea of something so unnatural in society is likely to capture a great deal of public interest. They would want to know why this has been legalised, and how bad the crime is. The following line "Survive the Night" also captivates the viewer, possibly making them question whether they themselves would survive the night if it were a real idea. "Survive" also makes it clear that a lot of violent and brutal crime takes place on the night, and creates an "every-man-for-themselves" kind of story, implying that there will also be betrayal.

At the top of the poster the line "From the producer of Paranormal Activity and Sinister" is likely to attract regular horror film viewers. These two films have been extremely successful and are also both quite recent releases, so people who enjoyed those films are likely to want to see a film made by the same producer.

The release date of June 7th is also significant as it states that the annual Purge takes place on June 7th in the film, so by releasing the film on the same date, we again see the idea of wanting to make film concept seem realistic.

The billing block then features at the bottom of the poster , following the conventional position of billing blocks. At the end of it we can observe the hashtag "#survivethenight. These are used to create "twitter trends", encouraging the viewers to mention the film on social networking sites, which promotes it even further.