Halloween's Original Movie Poster Has A Creepy Hidden Detail - And It Happened By Accident
The poster design of John Carpenter's 1978 slasher "Halloween" is scary, subtle, and quite brilliant. The poster was painted by artist Bob Gleason who once said in an interview with Fangoria Magazine that he came up with the design while working for the Santa Monica-based graphic design firm B.D. Fox and Friends. Gleason noticed that the grooves that circumvent a pumpkin could be shadowed in a jagged, knife-like shape, and that he could use that image in conjunction with an actual knife. The poster features the hand of Michael Myers holding a large curved kitchen knife, melting into a repeated pattern that forms the face of a jack o' lantern.
Gleason's managers weren't too fond of his idea, feeling that Michael Myers' white-faced mask should be placed front-and-center, not the knife. A few days later, however, Gleason's managers came around and let him do the poster he wanted. It took him three or four days. Gleason would return 44 years later to paint the poster for David Gordon Green's 2022 film "Halloween Ends." Gleason also painted posters for John Carpenter's "The Fog," the Chuck Norris film "Force Vengeance," and Bruce Lee's "Game of Death."
In 2016, Gleason's original poster design sold for $84,000 at auction. According to a 2022 article for Insider, Gleason had to explain in a special auction letter that a hidden symbol in his design wasn't supposed to be there. If one looks closely at Michal Myers fist on the poster, one might be able to make out a face in the knuckles and veins. The second knuckle looks a little bit like a nose and the third and fourth knuckles might be seen as lips. The veins could be worms crawling out of the face's orifices.
Gleason assured buyers: that wasn't his intent.
It's a fist, not a face
Gleason's letter explained that the face-like image in Michael Myers' fist was indeed just a coincidence. The artist wrote:
"While painting the hand my thought was to have dramatic lights and dark shapes to match the strobe stabbing effects of the pumpkin. [...] I did not consciously know I was infusing in the back of the hand a screaming monster with worms coming out of his mouth, eye and nose. [...] his kind of freaks me out. I couldn't have done it better if I had tried to do that. What dark nightmares lurk in my psyche?"
When one sees the monster face, it's hard to unsee. It's easy to believe, though, that it was unintentional.
A code that I and many of my peers hear circulating throughout the 1990s was that the jagged pumpkin "teeth" on Gleason's poster, paired with the knife, spells out two capitals M's, clearly meant to indicate the initials of Michael Myers. This, too, was likely a coincidence. Indeed, it's likely that most "codes" you find hidden in movie posters are merely unusual caprices of the artist.
One might recall the minor scandal surrounding the VHS video cover of John Musker's and Ron Clement's 1989 animated film "The Little Mermaid." Early versions of the cover featured a large undersea castle made up of glittering golden spires. The spire in the center just happened to be incredibly phallic and the poster was eventually changed. There were rumors that the phallus was included deliberately by a disgruntled artist who had lost her job and wanted to paint a penis out of spite.
Snopes investigated the rumor and found it to be false. It seems the castle was merely drawn in a hurry. The penile resemblance was a coincidence.