Hitchcock Posters Re-Imagined

I've posted in the past about my fondness for movie poster art.  I'm a big fan of some of the stuff the Alamo Draft House has commissioned (like this excellent This Is Spinal Tap poster) Bosnian artist Ivan Vidovic's excellent Scorsese re-designs (check them out here) and of course I recently posted about a lot of the great fan-made posters for Stanley Kubrick's The Shining.    The latest batch of re-designs from graphic designer Laz Marquez focus on the films Alfred Hitchcock.

The first one is The Birds, and it's my favorite of the bunch.  One of my nerdy quibbles with poster re-designs is I feel they should still have the information required of a movie poster, chiefly the credits that are commonly found at the bottom of movie posters.  Without that information, I often feel like the re-designs look like book covers rather then movie posters.  This batch ignores that unwritten rule, but I still really like this image for its simplicity and starkness.

This next work tackles Vertigo, and here's a prime example of my aforementioned rule.  This poster would look better - and more like a movie poster - if it featured the credit information along the bottom.   I also find it a bit odd that Marquez always lists Alfred Hitchcock but just his last name, as if he were a famous soccer player.   I like this design, but ultimately find it a bit underwhelming.  The bigger issue, however, is how similar this design is to the actual poster for Vertigo.  He used the same design, same color scheme (inverted) and even used similar typeset for the title.  

This one is a big miss for me.   First of all, the image appears to be a man standing with binoculars to his face, which, if you've seen the film, is a bit of a problem because Jimmy Stewart, the man who does the watching in the movie, is confined to a wheelchair.  Having him standing is a huge gaffe right out of the gate.  Also, the all black silhouette with white binoculars gives him a spooky look, which is all well and good for an Alfred Hitchcock movie, except that Stewart's character is the hero, not the villain.  This appears to be a Rear Window poster made by someone that clearly hasn't seen the movie.  (I won't even get into the fact that a window appears behind him, in the opposite direction of where he's looking.)

The final re-design is for the Hitchcock classic Psycho, and while it works as an arresting image that grabs your attention it seems only half thought out.   First of all, we have a lot of blood splatter surrounding the shower drain, which is an obvious riff on the famous "shower scene" where Janet Leigh meets her demise courtesy of Mother's butcher knife.   But it doesn't seem too well thought out considering blood splatter on the bottom of a tub with a running shower on is an impossibility.   The scene even cuts to blood swirling down the drain, so it seems like an odd, uninformed design choice to opt for splatter.  Additionally, the blood running down into the typeset is cliched; and in this case lazy, did the blood also run upward to finish the "Y"?)   The absence of any water in the image while it's depicting the shower scene from the film makes this one a miss for me.

To check out more of Laz Marquez's work, check out his official website.