Horror Taglines, From The Bride of Frankenstein to Hereditary

Fear fits in a sentence, which is why horror produced so many lines that outlived their films. Below they run in date order, then come the stories behind the ones that stuck. If you read only one row, make it Alien’s. More lists are in the taglines by genre section.

Horror movie taglines in date order

The rows come from a LiveAbout collection of horror taglines. Six of them, Alien, Jaws 2, A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Fly, Pet Sematary and Re-Animator, use the wording on the poster page at IMP Awards, because the collection differs from the posters: it puts a comma in the Alien line, ends the Jaws 2 line with “into the water” and gives Re-Animator a “very good head” and a dish. Eight more rows also appear on the Filmsite decade pages with the same wording, and they carry both markers. Hereditary is a case of two posters: the collection has “Evil runs in the family,” while its IMP Awards page prints “Every family tree hides a secret.” Treat the single-source rows as the collection’s version of the line, not a poster transcription.

The most famous line in horror: two different contests

Dialogue and tagline are separate lists, and they are easy to confuse. On the dialogue side, Poltergeist’s “They’re here” is arguably one of the most famous lines in horror history. It comes directly from the movie, and it featured prominently in the trailer. It was also the film’s primary tagline, so the poster and the trailer pulled in the same direction. The collection records the sequel’s follow-up too: “They’re back.”

On the tagline side, Alien’s line is on countless lists of the best movie taglines ever written. The Library of Congress put the film on its National Film Registry in 2002 and quotes the line in the notice, and AFI ranks Alien seventh among sci-fi films.

Four lines with a story

Alien (1979). Copywriter Barbara Gips wrote “In space no one can hear you scream,” and it helped sell Ridley Scott’s film. The teaser poster carried a different line, “A word of warning…”. The whole story is on the Alien tagline page.

The Fly (1986). A directive is a good way to snare interest, and this one entered common parlance as a phrase of its own. It grossed $60.6 million. Its origin as spoken dialogue is on the Fly tagline page.

Jaws 2 (1978). The line plays upon the aquaphobia many viewers developed after the first Jaws, and by leaving out why it is not safe it lets the reader imagine horrors infinitely more disturbing than the ones in the film. It became quotable for just about anything with a sense of ominous danger ahead. Credit and details are on the Jaws 2 tagline page.

The Last House on the Left (1972). Its line, “To avoid fainting, keep repeating ‘It’s only a movie’”, was not new: it had been used before, for Color Me Blood Red in 1964 and Strait-Jacket the following year, and other releases re-purposed it afterward. The 1970s list has the rest of that dare-and-warning decade.

Two more rows are worth a second look because they are so short. “Some houses are born bad.” sold The Haunting, and “It knows what scares you.” sold Poltergeist. At the other end, “Today the pond! Tomorrow the world!” sold Frogs, a film from 1972. Halloween’s poster set its line in italics on a black background. The Last House on the Left line may have started in a screening room: Cunningham claims the marketing specialist who devised the title was watching a cut with his wife, who kept covering her eyes, and told her it was “only a movie”.

Dares, gimmicks and false claims

Horror has always sold with more than words. Psycho was the first film sold in the US on the basis that no one would be admitted to the theater after the film had started. Last House’s artwork warned that the film was “not recommended for persons under 30”.

Some campaigns blurred the line between marketing and fact. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s false marketing as a “true story” helped it attract a broad audience.

The Blair Witch Project went further. When it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival at midnight on January 23, 1999, its campaign listed the actors as either “missing” or “deceased”. Artisan Entertainment bought the distribution rights for $1.1 million. The tagline described student filmmakers who disappeared in the woods and footage that was found a year later, and the film had a second tagline, “Everything you’ve heard is true.” It initiated a revival of found-footage filmmaking.

What the good ones have in common

A tagline sums up the tone and premise of a film in a memorable dramatic phrase. Four moves show up in the table above. A directive: “Be afraid. Be very afraid.” tells the viewer what to feel. A question the poster will not answer: Halloween’s “The night HE came home” immediately brings up a number of questions. A pun with a picture: Re-Animator’s poster illustrates its line, leaving no doubt that Herbert West has an actual head on his desk. And an unspoken threat: the Jaws 2 line names no monster.

The misses are as instructive. A tagline must work with the poster, the title and the film. The failed lines, such as a boast or a line that fits any revenge film, are catalogued in how to write a movie tagline. A genre film cannot simply say it is very much of its genre.

Horror also has a place in the Registry. Halloween was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry, and the Library of Congress’s bulletin on the 2001 selections calls Jaws the landmark horror film that created the phenomenon known as the “summer movie”.