The horror magazine front cover I will be doing a textual analysis on will be the Virus magazine front cover. I think this is a great cover to do an analysis on and for me; it seems like a very effective horror magazine front cover. Virus magazine is a very popular horror magazine for dark culture, it covers films, music, games, people and more, I believe it is a very high quality magazine.
Masthead: Virus’ masthead is very distinctive; the colour of the writing is white, and there is no drop shadow but just a bold masthead. A very simple font is used for the masthead but with added affects it looks distorted and messy like how viruses are. Parts of it a broken off and it looks damaged. This really allows the masthead to standout and be very effective with its original design.
From looking at the cover we can see that there is a close up shot of a man in the centre of the image with his head lent back and his mouth wide open with a drill facing down into his mouth. We can see an expression of anxiety and fear in his face. The top of the drill is blocked by darkness and by the masthead; the colour of the magazine is bronze, brown and black. Only one half of the man’s face and body is visible. We can see that the movie Hostel is the focus on this magazine front cover. The masthead is in big letters and at the top and has a damaged effect, also the word virus is written again underneath this in italics. All the cover lines are at the bottom of the page apart from the main one about the film Hostel. Also the different section titles such as ‘Movies’ are all in orange and a similar colour to the image and the rest are all white. These other cover lines show the main topics of this magazine which are different films and games and people and such which relate to the horror genre. It shows words that say “the dark side of entertainment” and in the letter S we can see that this is issue #10. There is German words at the top that translate to “pain-causing tenth ausgabe”, I believe this has to do with the tenth edition of the magazine. Also there is a barcode in the bottom right corner which is positioned vertically.
Connotation: From looking at the cover I can connote many things. The man with his mouth opened wide with the drill keeping him in that position connotes fear and submissiveness. While also adding fright about the two coming in contact with each other. This cover may also give some people the “cringe” factor because we all know what will happen if that drill touches the man. From the split of light and dark on the image, we can connote a sense of disorientation
Mise en scene:
Lighting: There is both high key and low key lighting in the image, this allows for us to see the character and what’s happening to him. The darkness lets us know he’s somewhere dark and connotes fear and conceals his identity. Also all the words are in brighter font than the image so stand out and allow the image to be separate and more noticeable.
Setting: From looking at the poster, we can only see a close-up shot of the man and none of his surroundings; this may be because they want us as an audience to concentrate on this part of the man and nothing else. However, he is in a dark place, probably a basement, which is a convention of where victims would usually be in a horror.
Considering all of these points I would suggest that the target audience for this magazine would be 18-35 year olds, who have a niche interest in reading about this genre and movies and such associated with it. It would mostly have a male audience as males generally have a keener interest in this genre than females, due to its dark nature.
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