The poster for John Carpenter’s 1978 slasher “Halloween” is creepy, subtle and quite brilliant. It was painted by artist Bob Gleason and its original poster sold for $84,000 at an auction in 2016. As Business Insider reported in 2022, Gleason explained in a special bidding letter that a hidden symbol in the poster was not supposed to be there. If you look closely at the fist on the poster, you can make out a face in the knuckles and veins. The second joint looks a bit like a nose, while the third and fourth joints can be thought of as lips (with the veins resembling worms crawling out of the facial orifices).
Gleason assured buyers: that was not his intention.
Speaking to Fangoria magazine in 2022, Gleason explained that he came up with the design for the “Halloween” poster while working for the Santa Monica-based comic book graphic design company Fox and Friends. He noticed that the grooves surrounding a pumpkin could be shaded into an irregular, knife-like shape, an image he could use with a real knife. The poster, you may notice, shows the hand of iconic Halloween killer Michael Myers holding a large, curved kitchen knife, blending into a repeating pattern that forms the face of a jack-o-lantern.
Gleason’s managers weren’t too fond of his idea, feeling that Myers’ white-faced mask should be placed front and center, not the knife. Soon after, however, Gleason’s managers came around and let him make the poster he wanted. (It took him three or four days.) 44 years later, Gleason returned to paint the poster for David Gordon Green’s 2022 film “Halloween Ends,” having also painted the posters for John Carpenter’s “The Fog,” Chuck Norris’s “Force Vengeance” and Bruce Lee’s “Game of Death” in the meantime.
The “face” on the original Halloween poster was completely accidental
Gleason’s special letter explained that the image of Myers’ face in his fist on the “Halloween” poster was indeed a mere coincidence. As he said:
“When hand painting, my idea was to have dramatic lights and dark shapes to match the strobe effects of the pumpkin. […] I didn’t consciously know that I was infusing the back of my hand with a screaming monster with worms coming out of its mouth, eyes and nose. […] [It] It freaks me out a little. I couldn’t have done better if I tried to do that. What dark nightmares hide from me?
When you see the monster’s face, it’s hard not to see it. Tony Moran, who played a twenty-something Myers in Carpenter’s “Halloween,” even teased attendees at a film convention about it once (via LADbible). “Do you see that hand? It’s something other than a hand,” he asked. “Well, I’m not going to tell you, you’ll take a look yourself, brother.” When the participants in question did so, Moran responded: “If you see him, don’t say a word. Don’t say a word.
That said, it’s easy to believe that this detail wasn’t intentional. Back in the 1990s, I remember hearing that the jagged pumpkin “teeth” on the “Halloween” poster, paired with the knife, spelled out two capital M’s to indicate Myers’ initials. This too was surely a coincidence. Indeed, it is likely that most of the “hidden details” in movie posters are just unusual whims of their artists.
Perhaps most infamously, there was a long-running rumor that a disgruntled Disney employee hid a shape of a phallus in the original poster for the studio’s animated film “The Little Mermaid.” Like the “screaming monster with worms,” this too was purely accidental.
