They Live Posters

The Central Cinema here in Seattle asked me to do some posters for some of their up-coming shows. John Carpenter's They Live was on the list and I had to do it. The poster at the top is the one they're going with and the one on the bottom was passed on for whatever reason. I'll just make prints of it myself.

The one that on top I chose to do in a rough painted style akin to those great Polish movie posters you might have seen before. They're always really well designed and sometimes very abstract. I couldn't get around the iconic alien face and just loosened myself up a lot to get the final result.

I've loved the alien design in this movie since I was a kid. It's really iconic to me. When I finally saw this movie just a few years ago I was already aware of Shepard Fairey and thought that he had to have been influenced by this film. With all the subliminal messages like "OBEY" and whatnot. When I got this chance I just had to riff on his most recent iconic piece. Almost as if I'm bring his original idea back around on itself.
I made sure that Fairey hadn't done the same thing already and only saw his own They Live piece. Researching I saw a couple of people give a good try and make this same image, but as the obsessive "literalist" that I am I HAD to recreate it as close to the original as possible.

John Carpenter's They Live will be showing from April 16th to April 22nd. At the Central Cinema in Seattle. Prints available now at Imagekind.com