Scream magazine front cover analysis

The masthead is the visual branding of the magazine. The font is in red to attract the audience’s attention because red is the colour that most strands out to the human eye. The red also represents danger which is relevant because the aim of a horror film is to scare the audience. The font is also made to look like it is dripping to resemble blood which is very effective. It suggests the films shown within this magazine will contain a lot of blood and gore. The main cover line is ‘Evil Dead’. The font is white against a darkly coloured background to stand out more than any other writing on the cover which reveals that this film is the most important feature in this magazine. It also has a hand on top of the letter ‘D’ to look as if it is coming out of the ground. The main image is the large image in the background. It appears to be a girl with cuts and pieces of her face missing, along with a couple of strands of greasy hair across her cheek. It consists of dark colours so that it does not distract too much from the text, however it is lighter on the face and the hand because this part of the image is in the centre of the front cover and it needs to stand out in order to attract readers. The only colour on this image is her yellow eyes which are used to attract the audience’s attention and make the cover uniform to go with the colour of the cover lines which makes the magazine appear consistent and professional. A ‘Puff’ or a ‘Splash’ is often put on a magazines front cover. These contain extra information or free giveaways. In this case it is a yellow circle on the top right containing the price. The word ‘PLUS’ is on the bottom left. This is a buzz word and is used to grab the audience’s attention, hence why it is in white. It suggests there are even more stories than those which appear on the front cover. At the bottom of the magazine is a strip of writing in small print separated from the rest of the magazine by a thin white line. This lists the majority of interesting features within the magazine. Website addresses are usually placed at the top or bottom in order to give additional information to the readers; in this case it is at the top in capitals and also in a white font. Finally the barcode follows the conventions of a magazine due to it being bottom right of the page. It is placed here so that it is not a distraction from the other features.