Chaneesa- Textual Analysis of a Magazine Cover

Denotation: The magazine cover consists of a colour photograph of a man wearing a metallic/chrome plated skull on his face. It is an extreme close up of the face as you cannot see any other art if the body. The background of the photograph is very dark (black) with white parts around also however we cannot detect what they are. The photograph takes up the whole of the magazine cover.

A little bit above the head is the masthead ‘FANGORIA’ and there are six separate coverlines, a puff advertising a competition and a main coverline.

A vertical barcode is visible at the bottom left corner of the magazine.

Masthead: Fangoria’s masthead is very distinctive; the colour of the writing is red with a white outline with no drop shadow. The font used is son serif and the writing is joined up. The writing used is geometrical shapes that have very sharp edges; this is one of the conventions of horror. There is no complication of the writing however it is different but not plain. Having a white outline makes the masthead stand out to the readers and it gives and edgy touch to it. From the name of the masthead ‘FANGORIA’ we can tell that is in an unusual name, and something to do with horror. What’s more the fact it is written in red shows the genre of the magazine as it connotes danger, blood, pain, power, the devil, fire, heat etc.

The cover photograph is of the chrome skull who is wearing a chrome/metallic skull on his face. We cannot see any facial expressions but the mask looks very malevolence so it puts the audience in apprehension of who is behind the mask or what this man is capable of. As the photograph is an extreme close up we cannot see any other part of this body, this may be because they want us as an audience to concentrate of the mask and nothing else as that is the main focus of the magazine. What we do know is that the main coverline relates with photo on the cover.

The main coverline that relates to the photograph says:

“LAID TO REST, HE KILLS YOU BEST!”

‘LAID TO REST’ is a movie that was released in 2009 written and directed by Robert Hall, the photograph on the front cover “chrome skull” is the main character in the film. ‘HE KILLS YOU BEST’ may be relating to how he killed the characters in the movie and they taken that and put it on the cover of the magazine and used it to advertise the film. It is also written in yellow which makes it stand out to the audience which is quite unusual because the genre of horror doesn’t generally use light colours, this goes against the conventions. in addition the ‘HE’ stands out from the rest of the writing as it has been made bigger and has a slant to it, which may show the distortedness of the man as it is emphasised on the word HE. ‘LAID TO REST’ is also written in the colour red but the font is much simpler than the font of the masthead. The main coverline rhymes which shows the wittiness to the magazine.

The other coverlines show that the main topics of this magazine are different films or programmes which also have a dark side to it and don’t cover any other topics but horror. The magazine concentrates mainly on films as Fangoria is an internationally-distrubuted US film fan magazine specialising in the genres of horror, slasher, splatter and exploitation films. There is also a variety of font used for the coverlines which doesn't make the magazine cover look plain; it also has different colours ranging from yellow to silver/metallic colours. There is a puff that is used on the front cover which is advertising a competition for a person to win a DVD, this highlights what type of audience buy this magazine.

The main conventions of the genre ‘horror’ is using dark, red colours and using sharp geometrical shapes, and FANGORIA appears to follow the conventions of the genre although it does go against it a few times by using the colour yellow which seems to bright for horror movies to use also using a puff which is in a circle appears to be unusual also as horror movies use quite sharp shapes like triangles.

When I consider all of these points, I would suggest that the target audience for this magazine would be males aged 16-25, who have an interest in reading reviews of the newest horror movies out. It wouldn’t really appeal to the female audience as it is really dark and most female prefer the opposite.