Shock Waves movie posters and titles

Shock Waves is a 1977 horror movie about a group of tourists who are shipwrecked and land on an island swarming with aquatic Nazi zombies. It was directed by Ken Wiederhorn and stars Peter Cushing, Brooke Adams, and John Carradine.

The movie’s title is set in Tension for most materials, including at the start of the movie. In the trailer and opening title sequence, the title setting is also animated with a red-white stroboscopic effect, flashing the typeface’s horizontal line patterns on and off, and finally leaving just the awkward solid contours.

Other typefaces are mixed and matched for secondary purposes in different materials: the most common poster for the US market uses Helvetica Compressed and Helvetica for additional text, the trailer uses Venus, and the credits in the film itself are set in Univers.

This use of Tension is not to be confused with the use for the Shock paperback series by Richard Matheson (Dell) which coincidentally also includes a volume with the title of Shock Waves.