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The teacup. The wide-open eyes frozen in fear. The sunken place. That deer.
These are the most memorable moments from Jordan Peele’s horror film “Get Out,” nominated for four Oscars, including best picture. Several artists have run with these images in creating alternative movie posters, borrowing from the plot, which revolved around Chris, an African-American photographer, who leaves the city with his white girlfriend to visit her parents.
The artists’ visions serve less of a promotional purpose and instead help to tease out of the horror picture’s themes. Below are four standouts.
Jay Shaw
Designing for the Austin, Texas-based movie poster outfit Mondo, Mr. Shaw captured the fun and the fear of the movie with a key scene: Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) is hypnotized by the way his girlfriend’s mother (Catherine Keener) methodically stirs a spoon in a cup of tea. By turning Chris into the teacup, Mr. Shaw gets into the character’s head. The starkness of the black-and-white imagery ignites the moment and illuminates the battle between the two races at the heart of the movie. And while the poster has plenty of white space around the edges, the lettering of the title is tight, with the spoon in the middle taking up the only room between the words. That design creates an even greater sense of claustrophobia.
Matt Talbot
This poster pulls from a moment when Chris learns more about what the villains want from him. The location, a dated wood-paneled game room, is a vintage throwback with an undercurrent of menace. Mr. Talbot gets at that sense of play with his cool blue background, and that sense of danger by showing only two items, an old television with a blank screen and the mounted head of a deer with blank eyes. From bottom to top, the poster has a nice sense of triangular balance, starting with the black base and rising to those evil, twisty antlers. It’s the last game room you’ll ever want to find yourself in.
Andrew Sebastian Kwan
“Now, sink into the floor.” That line starts one of the movie’s most fascinating, and chill-inducing, visual moments, when Chris heads to the “sunken place.” And Mr. Kwan, a talented illustrator of movie and pop culture subjects, captures its mystery beautifully. In one image, he illuminates what’s most frightening about the film, the idea of being silenced, separated from society, unable to act or have any effect on what’s around us. The smattering of stars in a black background makes the moment one of both beauty and of despair.
Edgar Ascensão
This close-up image uses a clever optical illusion to bring together all the key moments of a scene. Mr. Ascensão has a fondness for, and a keen ability with, circular motifs. (You can also see this in an alternative poster he designed for last year’s best-picture winner, “Moonlight.”) For “Get Out,” it feels as if Mr. Ascensão laid his poster on a table, then set a cup of tea on top of it. The cup ring becomes Chris’s wide-open eye, with the heat from the tea steaming out like a tear. More fascinating still, a closer look inside the teacup reveals a tiny image of Chris in the sunken place, reaching out.
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