Shutter Island Poster Analysis

Shutter Island is a 2010 psychological mystery-thriller film directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Leonardo DiCaprio. The film is based on the 2003 novel of the same name by Dennis Lehane. Production started in March 2008. Shutter Island was originally slated to be released on October 2, 2009, but Paramount pushed the release date to February 19, 2010

This is a very clever and interesting poster which is extremely effective. There are many aspects of the poster to analyze and we could use different things in ours.

• The main actor in the film is Leonardo DiCaprio and of course, he is one of the main selling points of the film. He is shown close up and anyone looking at it can straight away tell that he is in the film. By using an extreme close up you can tell that he is concentrated on something and with the colour used in his eyes you can tell that something is troubling him. Also you can see that he has stubble, showing that he may be too busy doing something else. By placing him there it will attract his fans.
• The match he is holding is a genre indicator as he is looking into the unknown and makes you feel like it could be something you see in a horror film.
• Next is the tag line used: ' Someone is missing ' . This is a great title as it makes the way Leonardo is holding the match even more significant. It makes the audience want to know why there is someone missing and they will go see it for this reason.
• The picture of an island is very clever. When you look at it closely you can see that it is made up of smaller pictures, pieced together. It reinforces the idea that Leonardo may be a character which is piecing together information to locate the missing person. Also it sets the location of the film up and it also is a genre indicator. This is because it looks a scary place and the darkened colour helps it look like a perfect horror film location.
• As well as all of this the title of the film is key as well. It is a yellow/white colour and is the biggest piece of text on the poster. With the actor's name and directors above, it stands out clearly and make the name seem very important.
• With the background colour being black it reinforces the horror genre and helps it look and eye catching and scary looking poster.

Overall I feel that this is a brillant poster and helps attract the audience as well as showing off its genre.

What we can take from this is the way the island is shown to be very scary. If we can make our house look as scary as that on our poster it will look professional and scary.