Ghoulies and the Power of a Good Film Poster

It’s a pretty common occurrence to have film posters slapped on a wall of your home at some point in your life. Whether you’re a film fanatic, aspiring filmmaker, or that guy Curtis who is obsessed with Fight Club and The Dark Knight for all the wrong reasons, proudly displaying some cool art from films you love is a near-certainty. There’s a magic to them, a memory connection that is yours, and yours alone, even if that memory is thinking Zack Snyder’s Batman Vs. Superman was peak cinema. A good film poster can intrigue, even when you know nothing about it.

In the days before the internet made it incredibly easy to find out what the fuck a film was about, seeing posters and cases for otherwise unknown films in a rental shop were usually the only window into what you could expect. The imagination was fired up by just a single striking image. You became your own personal hype machine for something that was unlikely to match your enthusiasm with quality or entertainment.

For me, one poster in particular resonated far, far deeper than the film itself. At the age of 7, and on a familiar Saturday afternoon hunt for something to watch at the video rental shop, I browsed the category aisles, eyeing the horror section as usual because there was always some cool covers to horror films. It was in that section that I spotted a poster on the back wall that made me stop searching for a weekend film fix for a few moments as I drew closer to inspect it.

On a dark background sat a toilet. A good old-fashioned porcelain pisspot with nary a spot of grime on it. Yet this toilet had something grim and frightening emerging from it, and perhaps most terrifying of all, it wore suspenders.

This was the poster for cult 1980s horror hit Ghoulies, and the beastie rising out of the toilet bowl was a little green bugger with needle-like teeth and an inky-eyed stare called Fish (I’m assuming that’s due to his physical form being similar to that of the Creature From the Black Lagoon). I knew nothing of the film itself, and it would be years before I discovered that this wasn’t actually all about green monsters popping out of toilets, but that green-skinned gargoyle would go on to feature in dreams I remember vividly to this day.

In the first dream, the very night after I’d seen that poster, I was in my bed, and heard a noise downstairs. I crept out to the landing and looked over the railing into the murky darkness of the ground floor where I could see a small shape scurrying about, grunting. Dream logic and reasoning suggested it was just the dog, even though we didn’t have one anymore, and I started to head down the winding stairs to put it back in the kitchen.

Of course, it wasn’t the dog, it was that green fucker, sky blue shirt, and bright red suspenders and all. It comes screeching up the stairs with a clear intent to use those pointed teeth to pierce my pale skin. Naturally, I ran, climbing out of a first-floor window to escape into the night rather than warn any family members about the surely carnivorous little beast that was in our house. I turned to see lights come on, and screams began piercing the still night air. I woke up terrified in a way no dream has ever done so since.

That green goblin would live in my dreams rent-free for years, sporadically popping up in new scenarios, chasing me out of new places. Those dreams became somewhat exciting to have, as they felt like a continuing story that gradually got less scary and more comedic (the tipping point was probably a dream where I was at the cinema and it was disguised in a trenchcoat and hat in the row in front of me). The dreams stopped, but they always stayed in my head, a self-inflicted mixture of fear and entertainment that undoubtedly helped shape my love of horror.

I didn’t actually watch Ghoulies until a few years ago. By then, of course, my perception of what it was had been so skewed by my imagination that it was unsurprisingly underwhelming, and far tamer than that poster had led me to believe. Still, it felt like a bit of closure on something that had become damn near mythical is the time between gawping at that poster and finally watching the film itself.

While the film was poor, I greatly appreciate the longstanding impact that Ghoulies poster had on me.