Paris-based illustrator Nico Delort, whose A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night poster was Mutant’s first release (limited edition of 215, now sold out), demonstrates a different Gothic approach: restraint through suggestion.
“I’ve never done explicitly violent imagery for a movie poster, even for a film like Jaws,” they explain. “I played with suggestion and foreshadowing.”
Nico works in Claybord – a white surface they ink themselves before scratching out lines with a knife. The process is subtractive: removing ink to reveal light beneath. Working area by area, they build contrast through line variation – thicker, spaced lines in the foreground to create focus; thinner, condensed lines in the background to suggest atmospheric recession. “It’s an illusion that can be quite effective,” they note. The technique gives their work its particular quality of patient accumulation. Darkness isn’t painted on; it’s carved around.
For The Hunger Games: Illustrated Edition, this restraint carried political weight. “You have to keep in mind these are children being killed in the arena, so of course, we had to avoid explicit violence,” Nico explains. “For that particular scene, I focused more on the emotion and the fact that this is one of the moments in the story that lights the spark that will become the revolution in books two and three.”
Nico’s archive mixes literary illustration (Gustave Doré’s Idylls of the King forest scenes), Depression-era documentary photography (Dorothea Lange, Appalachian mining towns), and cinematic grammar. For The Hunger Games, they pulled from these sources to identify the Gothic sensibility beneath the dystopian premise: “the descriptions of District 12, Snow’s looming presence, the menace of technology wielded by the Capitol.” Gothic patterns – oppressive architecture, surveillance, class horror – appearing in material not typically marketed as Gothic.
Where Ana Lily Amirpour’s 2014 film shows the vampire girl, Nico foregrounds what we don’t see – the oil jacks as a hostile presence, the desolate industrial landscape dwarfing solitary figures. “The characters’ environment being a hostile, ominous presence is a common element in Gothic art and literature… that’s why I chose to feature the oil jacks so predominantly,” they explain. Using their scratching technique, the oil jacks become stark forms built through patient mark-making – an approach that defines their broader methodology: “When I do movie posters, I try not to draw a scene taken straight from the movie, but try to imagine the moments we don’t see, what’s between the cuts.”
