The Evil Dead movie posters
US one sheet by New Line Cinema Corp., 1983
One sheet movie posters for the 1981 supernatural horror film The Evil Dead, written and directed by Sam Raimi and starring Bruce Campbell. The film serves as the first entry in the Evil Dead franchise. While the film premiered in Detroit on October 15, 1981, it wasn’t launched nationally before April 15, 1983.
On the US one sheet the film’s title is based on New Zelek, albeit heavily modified. Review quote from Stephen King and credit block are set in Gill Sans. On the Spanish poster, seen below, the film’s title is based on Futura. On the last poster, referred to as the International one sheet, the title is set in ITC Serif Gothic, with the tagline and review quote in ITC Souvenir and credit block in Futura. Attribution for King’s quote here is set in Helvetica Black.
Movie Posters Gallery credits the US one sheet poster to Mark Elliott Skolsky.
Spanish one sheet poster, also from after New Line Cinema acquired the distribution rights, and likely following the design of the US poster shown above
International one sheet by New Line Cinema Corp., 1983
1 Comment on “The Evil Dead movie posters”
Thank you, Patrick!
The poster featuring ITC Serif Gothic and ITC Souvenir might predate the others. At least it shares the typographic choices made for the trailer to the film, which has a MCMLXXXII (1982) date. Also note the missing article in the title in both instances.
Title card shown at the end of the trailer to Evil Dead
We have two similar tags, “lettering derived from typeface” and “modified typeface”. The former is for manually drawn (or otherwise freely rendered) letterforms which are unmistakably based on an existing typeface. The latter is for cases where a typeface was directly involved, but got altered by the user.
I agree with you that the design of the title on the US poster follows New Zelek. I doubt that the designer worked with the typeface and modified it. They rather drew the letterforms from scratch, in the spirit of Bronisław Zelek’s typeface. The differences go beyond the larger changes like the A and V, and also extend to details like the stroke thickness, the counter size in D, and the angle of the cut-off corners. Shown below is a visual comparison. This hence is a case of “lettering derived from typeface”.
Left: the film’s title as shown on the US one sheet poster
Right: a resetting in New Zelek (using the digitization by Threedotstype)
In contrast, the designer of the Spanish poster probably worked with Futura and made changes directly to its prefabricated letterforms (like cutting corners, extending strokes, or making a new A from parts of an N). So that poster is a case of “modified typeface”. #ExistentialTypeQuestions