Similar Products (Task 12)- Poster Analysis 3 - The Shining

The Shining is an iconic, famous and extremely successful example of a thriller movie. The film is a certificate 18 so the poster aims to appeal to this audience mostly. The film was released in 1980 and was  not successful with audiences at first. However as times changed the film became a classic and one of the most famous films ever made.

1. The poster works on the success of famous director Stanley Kubrick, if the audience were to try and guess the style of film by this they could assume the film is psychological and most likely to involve symbolism and a complex plot and concept behind it.

2. The main focus of the poster is Jack Nicholson, he is renowned for playing strange and often insane characters therefore the audience could guess the theme of the film is likely to follow that of a psychotic nature. The image used is iconic and the most famous and well known images of the film. The character has broken through  a door. The facial expression shown suggests the character is menacing another character, is violent, out of control and most likely to be psychopath. The image is extremely successful because of the image alone, the characters bottom teeth are showing resembling similarities to the image of a crazed animal. The image is unnerving as the character not only looks crazed but also overly excited. The poster uses Roland Barthes enigma code, "What is happening in the image?"

The poster is successful because it simple, it gives very little away whilst suggesting so much about the film, the poster is eye catching and makes the audience really think about the emotion of the character, it is an poster that must really be assessed deeply and although nothing gory or violent is explicitly shown the audience can immediately tell who the film is aimed at. 


The film falls short in the fact that not much is suggested about what is happening within the picture, however the sheer iconicity of the image is enough to sell the film.