Gallery Three — The Slashers

Twenty-six posters covering eleven years, and they are the most commercially consequential eleven years in the history of horror. Halloween arrives in 1978 and the shape of the thing is set: a masked figure, a knife, a date on the calendar, and a tagline that promises the night he came home. What follows is a decade of imitation that turned into an industry. Look at how quickly the visual grammar hardens — the mask centered, the weapon raised, the title in a font that drips. Look too at how many of these are dated: the poster tells you which day of the year to be frightened. No other genre markets itself by the calendar, and no other genre has claimed a holiday so completely.