31 Days of Halloween - Day 11

Continuing from yesterday's post --

The famed Spanish surrealist, Salvador Dali (1904-1989) also created his own skull illusions using female models as seen above and below.

The upper version went on to find a place, almost hidden in the poster for Silence of the Lambs (1991), Jonathan Demme's excellent, multiple Academy Award winning, adaptation of the Thomas Harris novel with a screenplay by Ted Tally and starring Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins. As anyone who has seen the movie will remember, this drama about tracking a serial killer featured death head moths as one of the clues. The actual death head moth looks like this:

Note the human skull like markings on the back of the moth's carapace. These markings vary from individual to individual, but all have a skull like aspect. It made perfect sense to include an image of the moth on the poster for the movie.

Like the movie, the poster was also very memorable and award winning. Take a close look at the back of that death head moth. Clicking on any of the images will make them larger. See it?

There it is, not any natural markings, but instead a reproduction of Dali's skull illusion which was suitable given the nature of the crimes involved in the storyline.

Dali's skull illusion would go on to find it's home in another movie poster.

This time, the characters in The Descent (2005) a horror film with an all female cast about a spelunking trip gone terribly wrong, are arranged in a way that forms the illusion of a human skull.

The 2009 film Mati Suri (Comatose) also used a skull illusion for its poster. This one was not based on the Salvador Dali image, but positioned doctors and surgical lights to create the illusion.