Parris's Poster Textual analysis

Film Title: One Missed Call

Year of Release: 2008

Director: Eric Valette

Producers: Andrew Kosove, Broderick Johnson, Scott Kroopf, Jennie Lew Tugend and Lauren Weissman

Distributors:  (Japan) Kadokawa Pictures and Warner Bros. Pictures

One missed call which was written by Andrew Klavan is the American remake of the 2004 Japanese film ‘Chakushin Ari’ originally written by Yasushi Akimoto and Minako Daira.

A film poster is a type of advertisement used to promote a film. The purpose of the poster is to visually capture the audience’s attention so it can convince the audience to go and see the film when it is released. Film posters usually include the main image, a tagline, the film title and the release date. They could be put in magazines, billboards, on the sides of Double Decker buses in the UK and on the internet which is would mainly be social networking websites such a Facebook and Myspace.

On the One Missed Call poster I instantly notice the face on the poster. It is a close up shot of a persons face holding a phone to their ear. However the face is not a usual face as the eyes are made of to mouths supposedly screaming out loud. This could be used to make the audience wonder if the main person is a male or female as they cannot see their eyes, it could also make the audience wonder why the characters mouth who is used as eyes is screaming or what is making them scream. The main image looks as if they are fading away into the darkness as if the character does not want to be seen. This could show a sense of mystery as the image is fading away to become the unseen. Seeing as the dominant colour on the poster is black, this creates a sense of fear, death and evil. The tagline at the top of the poster above the main image and the release date below the main image are a dark red. This could symbolise that there could be a lot of blood, pain and maybe anger within the film.

The title and the information about the film are a plain white; however the title looks as if it becomes blurry at the bottom, of each letter. It is placed in the centre bottom of the page to make sure that the audience is able to read it clearly and easily. The title reads ‘One Missed Call’ this could mean that the film is straight forward because it means the main character(s) may die because they have missed a phone call from the supposed killer. The tagline ‘what will it sound like when you die?’ address the audience by asking a question directly to them. The question automatically lets the audience know that the victim in the film may hear a certain sound before/when they are about to die or they may be a certain noise when the killer kills the victim.