The eye has it

Not just a vivid poster here. A vivid lesson in the impact of good cropping.

I was reading an article on the movie-poster art of Al Kallis for American International Pictures. AIP was, per Wikipedia, "the first company to use focus groups, polling American teenagers about what they would like to see and using their responses to determine titles, stars, and story content. … a typical production involved creating a great title, getting an artist such as Albert Kallis who supervised all AIP artwork from 1955 to 1973 to create a dynamic, eye-catching poster, then raising the cash, and finally writing and casting the film.”

Kallis had the pedigree. Along with his previous work as a poster layout artist for the influential Saul Bass, Kallis was the son of Maurice Kallis, a famed movie poster artist himself.

 

Perusing the work of Kallis the younger, I have to assume that his posters were likely more effective at evoking terror and dread than the movies themselves. His artwork and compositions had a lurid pulp-magazine quality, with the requisite helpless women in skimpy outfits menaced by otherworldly beasts, aliens, or Lovecraftian horrors.

Still, most of his poster art just earned a shrug from me. But the one at the top of this post – for 1957’s Not of This Earth – I found oddly mesmerizing.

 

Not having seen the movie, I don’t know what that weird lump with the eyeball and tendrils is all about. What really caught my eye was the close-up of the woman filling nearly half the lobby card. (That’s either star Beverly Garland or a lookalike). Have you ever seen a better depiction of sheer terror? The eyes wide, the mouth in mid-scream, the hands desperately clawing at her own face. 

 

Kind of a masterpiece for the genre, I’d say. But wait – let’s see what that image looks like when cropped for the vertical rectangle of a movie poster.

Wow.

 

The impact of that face is now even greater, putting it right up in your own face. But most of all, her horrified left eye, framed by her splayed fingers, is now near the center of the poster – and, even more than in the lobby card, that eye is seemingly making contact with you. Yes, that green space slime is there, too – interestingly, the tightness of the crop forces the images closer together, making a parallel between their eyes – but there’s no question of what it is that’s drawing you in. 

 

Incidentally, they remade the picture in 1988 – but this time, the poster has none of the original’s eye-popping oomph, and no amount of cropping would save it.