Design in Film Posters 6-'Inglourious Basterds': This just may be my masterpiece

This week's poster comes from another Tarantino film: Inglourious Basterds! Don't let the title fool you, they speak a lot of french in this movie, so you know it's fancy.

If you were to ask me to sum up Inglourious Basterds in a few words, they would be: bloody nazi fun. This is a fun movie, that borders on too self-aware the entire time. It knows it's a good movie and it revels in that. I love this design of this poster because there's real simplicity here (as simple as a bloody bat can be), but at the same time the poster makes a pretty bold statement. It's a fairly violent image, and by putting everything out there in this single image the designers are letting the audience know what they're in for. The tagline "Once upon a time in Nazi occupied France..." alludes to old spaghetti westerns which was a huge stylistic influence for the film, again setting up audience expectations. The color scheme of the poster is understated and works really well, the gray tones of the helmet and the clouds really help the blood on the bat stand out. The layout of the title and tagline (slightly slanted) matches well with the slant of the lines in the helmet and the bat. The match of all the lines helps add movement to the poster and keep from having the poster become boring. The iconography of the swastika also add so much to this poster because it is a symbol that is immediately recognizable and thus sets up another important part of the film.  It's a dynamic image that really captures the spirit of the film.