Red State Teaser Poster Online

Much like he’s been doing with every other stage of making Red State, Kevin Smith is now taking the marketing of the movie – in its pre-distributor stage, at least – to a more DIY level. The first teaser poster, created by producer’s assistant Melissa Bloom, has been shoved online at Smith’s Silent Bob Speaks blog and is below for your stare-o-tainment.

It’s certainly an atmospheric image, conjuring up religious terror and lo-fi filmmaking with a chunk of exploit-o-horror thrown in for good measure. And it proves you don’t necessarily need a focus-grouped image from a big ad agency to start getting people interested in your film

“This isn’t the work of some gun for hire who’s doing six other campaigns; we’re not just one of many. The marketer is actually family, Red from pre-production all the way through wrap, so she’s got an insight into the flick that no ad agency could ever boast (not even one-time Glo-Coat golden boy Don Draper over at SCDP). I’ll take passion over pedigree any day,” Smith writes on his site.

“When we first looked at Melissa’s poster, someone said “You should give this to the ad agency as a guideline.” Guideline? Was an ad agency gonna make us any happier than Melissa’s image made us? The Holy Ghost is kinda perfect, and more importantly? It gives us a starting point from which to launch our home-grown marketing campaign. There’s immediacy to it, but also: anybody could’ve taken the initiative and did this themselves. If folks were wondering why Melissa was skating up near the blue line, far from the corner where the puck was, it’s because she saw where the puck was gonna be, and just waited to make her rush on goal. She shoots, she scores. So Melissa (with a Gretzky-like assist by Ming), the person on the Red State crew least likely to spearhead our marketing campaign, gets the collar for this arresting image - and I f*****g dig that.”

And not only that, but thanks to taking back full control of the editing on the film, Smith has been able to knock up what he wants to make clear is not “some b******t assembly: this puppy is fine-cut, complete with credits and some pre-mixing: 92 mins without credits, 98 mins with a end credit sequence that’s not to be believed.” The writer/director reports that he hosted the majority of the movie’s cast and crew at a wrap party this weekend to watch the thing unspool before their eyes.

To see the full-size poster and read more flom the blog, click the pic*.*

The next step? Red State will need to find a distributor, which means a trip to Sundance is in the offing (assuming the festival accepts the pic). But based on the poster (and what we’ve heard about the film from the horse’s mouth in various interviews), we want to see this sucker right now…