A good horror movie might give you a startle or two while you’re watching it. A really good horror movie will stay with you for days or weeks after. A truly great horror movie will haunt your nightmares for the rest of your life… and the nightmares are usually way worse than the movie itself. An artist named Christopher Shy has somehow managed to capture the swirling, amorphous feeling of a nightmare with his series of watercolor horror and sci-fi movie posters, and each is more terrifying than the last.
As shared by Bloody Disgusting, Shy is a Wisconsin-based artist of science fiction and fantasy artwork who founded Studio Ronin in the mid-’90s and has worked for comic book companies like Marvel and Dark Horse. His work feels much more like a high art painting than it does any comic book stuff, and he has gorgeously turned to doing movie posters which will quickly become your favorite fan art versions. Check out the gallery below.
While there are a lot more pieces from all different kinds of movies (which you can purchase here), his horror stuff is my personal favorite. Shy clearly has a soft spot for John Carpenter, which immediately makes us lifelong friends. The Fog, The Thing, and Halloween III: Season of the Witch (which Carpenter didn’t direct, to be fair) are somehow even scarier in this form, and he even makes Escape from New York look terrifying.
I also find this Friday the 13th poster particularly haunting, with the machete seemingly extending up 15 feet, maybe signifying how unstoppable he is, and how death by his hand is a near certainty. It can also be that I thought too long and hard about this and have gone a bit spare. Either is probably likely.
Let me know which of the posters is your favorite (I included a Mad Max: Fury Road one and a Blade Runner one just for funsies) in the comments below!
Get scared even more with our interview with The Witch director Robert Eggers.
Images: Christopher Shy
Kyle Anderson is the Associate Editor for Nerdist. He writes the weekly look at weird or obscure films in Schlock & Awe. Follow him on Twitter!
