Whether adorning the cinema wall, shouting from the world’s largest billboards or peeking from inside a plastic sleeve, movie posters have always been uniquely different in Thailand.
The descriptive, exaggerated style of painting used to promote the first Thai movies has long been loved by film buffs, but has only recently become regarded as part of Thailand's cultural heritage. Characteristically, there is an abundance of detail, with the film’s heroes always dominating the painting. A package of smaller images is added around their picture, showing some events of the film to attract film goers.
They do the thing where they have a mass of as many characters as they can. It’s a sort of pastiche, which is almost like a collage because they've cut out certain parts.
A lot of the time, Thai posters would sexualize things beyond what actually happened in the movie. There is a famous old Thai film, where there's a woman lying almost diagonal across a first step. I guess it's a racey movie at the time, but nothing close to that happens in the movie.
The only time a homegrown movie could compete with a Western picture was if it was sensationalized in the poster to the extent that they often took events far further than the actual movie.
They would go over the top. The idea was that if the audience was wandering by and they had to choose between a Western movie and a Thai movie, the Thai movie had to offer, promise and deliver more in terms of the advert than the Western film because of the preconception that it wouldn't be of high production value.
Today, it is a common sight to see reproduction vintage Thai posters being picked up by backpackers from street stalls around Kao San Road. It’s not surprising that they might be drawn to the country’s unique use of the medium. In the West, audiences are used to seeing film posters with one or two primary images, usually the leading actors, a neutral background and not much else.
Thailand’s movie posters often morph several scenes from a film into a montage, giving a vague impression of narrative. A popular theory is that this style has its roots in the intricate painted murals on temple walls, which often use every inch of space to tell epic stories, although many would disagree.
They could more be seen like cartoons. It’s more about pastiche. They borrow more from comic books... especially up country.
In the early nineties, the Thai film distribution companies stopped commissioning Bangkok artists to paint posters, preferring to use photographic images instead. The PhotoShop age had made painting fashionable. Most Thai posters for Western movies now take the US or European poster and simply replace the English credits and text with Thai script, almost bringing an end to a unique tradition of cinematic re-interpretation.
From the 1950s to the 1990s, Thailand was known as a movie billboard superpower, producing spectacular displays as large as 120-feet long. In the capital, studios used 30 collaborators at a time to work on a single billboard, including carpenters to build and cut out shapes, figures and landscapes. A selection of still shots from the film company would be whittled down by a design director to create an original design. This was then sketched on paper in a scale drawing before using a square-to-square enlarging technique. Billboard posters were usually the combined effort of a group of specialized artists, with one man painting actors’ faces, another on clothing and others taking care of backgrounds. The individual artists are said to rarely have seen the movies themselves.
Asian horror movie posters have always been more graphic than their Western counterparts. In this Thai poster for the US movie, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3, one of the most disturbing images from the movie is recreated in all its gruesome glory. The original, parent-friendly US poster is on the right.
These days, Thailand may be better known for the covers of its counterfeit DVDs than its cinema posters. A strong demand for bootleg movies has led to a boom in semi-skilled PhotoShop graphic designers.
While the movie poster on the left for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was still adorning Bangkok cineplexes, the DVD cover on the right was already gracing street stalls everywhere. Comically, its makers give away their lack of English with the tagline in the top left, seemingly pulled at random from an internet review: “The best people possible are on the job, the only problem here is that it’s a job that doesn’t need to be done.” More than could be said for the DVD cover, perhaps.
After all of the inescapable marketing lavished on blockbuster movies by the legitimate studios, fake DVD covers only have to be recognizable. With a far smaller canvas to work with, poster elements are often removed to give a distilled, less confusing image: the exact opposite of Thailand’s descriptive painted posters. A DVD cover must be simple and iconic in order to catch the attention of a passing pedestrian or browsing customer. Hence, in the bootleg Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith (left), the unmistakable logo itself becomes the dominating image.
Today, skytrain stations feature letter-box shaped posters for Hollywood movies that soullessly reproduce US photographic artwork, but also add a synopsis and a reel of stills. It is easy to see how 30 years before those still images would have been artistically blended into the main poster image to produce an original work of art.
Nowadays, few Thai movie posters are still painted. Western-style posters look more modern to Thais, especially those in the cities. However, bold painted billboards are still favoured in the provinces, often using traditional techniques.
It still exists, but it doesn't look the same anymore. It looks really cheesy now. It's mostly done up country... not in Bangkok. It's done to market usually not even what you would consider blockbuster, but low-rent films that won't even be shown in Bangkok. They usually involve a misty ocean and some mystical woman's face standing in the water.
This billboard image, photographed days ago in the coastal town of Ranong, is for The Last Song: the bittersweet tale of a Thai ladyboy showgirl. The tones employed in the hand-painted billboard are brighter and less depressing than those in the official photographic poster.
It’s interesting, the gun got further from her head in the painted one, which would dispute the sensationalizing that was mentioned in this article before. It looks like she's already committed suicide. I guess it could be more horrible... If there was more blood on her veil, though, nobody would go and see it, I'm pretty sure.
The angle and proximity of the gun makes the showgirl’s suicidal tendencies more ambiguous in the billboard adaptation.
But the real question here is that you got a vertical image here and you have a horizontal billboard, so they obviously had to expand it to fit on the billboard. Cinema posters are always vertical, but if you have to fill a billboard, you'd have to just stretch the image, probably resulting in the angle.
This hand-painted billboard for Fast and the Furious 3: Tokyo Drift uses the Western photographic template, but replaces a black-and-white series of actors with a larger colour image of the film’s star in the tradition that the hero should always dominate the poster.
It takes a while to really register which Hollywood movie this billboard is for as it’s so radically different to the Western poster. Besides which, the square-by-square enlargement process has left Tom Hanks’ likeness slightly off-base. Billboard artists are said to take seven years to perfect their craft, and the makers of this example still seem to be studying. However, by cleverly stressing the Die Hard component of the movie it becomes more attractive for a Thai audience with a universal love of explosions and a separate set of religious and mystical beliefs than those explored in the story.
This Da Vinci Code billboard is like Return of the Jedi. The problem is that the Mona Lisa probably wouldn't read that well. It's a pop cultural icon that's recognized only in the West. So, it probably would not resonate as well. They probably didn't really care to get an action movie - a chase movie, so they made it into Star Wars with people running. It basically is a chase movie so it's not unrepresentative.
Below you can find a couple more painted Thai movie posters (of mainly foreign movies but also a couple Thai movies can be found) courtesy of Psychedelicatessen, Eatbrie and Siamvillage:
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