STOP HAUNTING MOTHER NATURE
Stop Haunting Mother Nature is a advertisement series for WWF, also known as The World Wide Fund for Nature Inc., focuses on having vital environment awareness elements to suit the organization's objective. The direction focuses on the negative impact of uncontrolled human activities instead of the benefits/positive impacts of controlled human activities. This increases the visual impact and makes a stronger impression. The outcome also aims to include surprise elements for memorable impacts.
A series of classic and modern horror film posters were chosen to depict the morale of the poster designs: The Shining, The Silence of the Lambs, and Halloween. These films were critically praised on their own, with strong cultural influence and relevance, further making more vital impressions. The visual elements and taglines from the original posters are all replaced with details relevant to WWF.
The Silence of the Lambs is restyled to become "The Silence of Nature". This poster shows the main character wearing a mask, an indicator of modern air pollution, instead of hinting at the recent pandemic, in which, coincidentally, wearing a mask is a norm.
The Shining is restyled to become "The Humans" as a metaphor for humans being the haunting element, while a freaked-out tree represents innocence and purity.
Halloween is restyled to "October 21", the day Thomas Edison invented the commercial light bulb. This hints at the beginning of the industrial revolution, which is also the beginning of mass pollution caused by human activities.
The posters are paired with the tagline "Stop haunting mother nature," reflecting the posters' origins as horror films. The outcome is a series of designs with solid pop culture relevance and a sense of familiarity with hidden surprise elements. The posters are also very subtle regarding the nature-related theme to avoid generic nature-related poster styling, making the visual outcome more appealing and unique, which suits WWF's usual advertising direction well.
The focused message of this advertisement series is to implement the horror elements onto humans ourselves, having humans as the horror elements/creatures that terrorize the innocent by producing pollution to nature. This emphasizes the act of pollution being at fault by having humans at the antagonists’ side in the poster.
The call to action includes WWF’s website and a hotline number, yet the main element that triggers action is to have a memorable experience for viewers of the design outcome.
Looking at the design itself, the main silhouette of the original film posters are still highly visible, only with minor parts revised to support the series’ theme: Stop haunting mother nature. This maintains a strong horror element while connects the relevance to preserving nature and reduce pollution.
Multiple design elements in the design links the ads as a series, including:
● A consistent branding and texts at the bottom of each ads
● The consistency of using classic/iconic horror films as the base of the design
● Having humans as the antagonists, nature as the protagonists
● A same message to viewers: increase the awareness of stop polluting nature
