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Liam Saylor, The Exorcist minimalist poster design
Winner of the 2012-13 OSU Marion Digital Media Composition Award
ARTIST’S STATEMENT:
William Peter Blatty’s deeply-disturbing tale of a young girl whose body and soul is invaded by a great force of evil has left its mark on Hollywood since William Friedkin’s chilling film adaption of The Exorcist in 1973. I remember hearing about the film as a child in the ‘90s and wanting to witness it for myself. However, to my dismay, my mother (who had always harbored a kind of superstitious feeling about the film) refused to let me see it for quite some time. It wasn’t until I was 10 years old that my pleading finally won her over and she begrudgingly rented a DVD copy of, “The Version You’ve Never Seen,” from our local Blockbuster to watch together. We held up well enough through the first half of the film until we got to the ‘staircase’ or ‘spider-walk’ scene in which the film’s vulnerable young character, Reagan McNeil (played by Linda Blair), is forced by the entity inside of her to contort her entire body into an almost inhuman stance and crawl down a staircase before vomiting a pool of blood at the bottom. At that moment, my ten-year-old self actually had to stop watching to catch my breath; we resumed and finished the film the night after.
Something about that mind-shattering sequence has never been able to be matched by any other moment in horror film history for me since. Thus, I wanted to capture it for this minimalist poster. I chose to build a simplified version of the stairs in the film without a railing as not to distract from the rest of the composition. Purple and black were chosen to pay homage to the color palette of the original posters for the film, as well as a skinny, serif font for the title. I feel including the title was necessary for the composition because of the iconic role that the font plays in the aesthetics for the film.
Originally, there was no border in the composition but I decided to add one to further evoke a more vintage-type poster aesthetic. Finally, references were used to illustrate the arms at the top of the staircase in odd angles because I wanted to allude to the contortion of Reagan’s body in the scene. However, I chose to render only the arms and not the entire body to mimic the feeling of “monster at the top of the stairs” I personally get in watching most of the film.
