Floating Head Syndrome

"They could whip up some bad Photoshop poster in an afternoon. They do it all the time. Two big heads."

— David Drayton, The Mist

A term referring to the tendency for Film Posters and DVD cover art to have a black background with the faces of the lead actors above the name of the movie. A simple one or two heads staring at you with the setting superimposed in the background with set-piece-specific art in the foreground. It could also be the entire cast in various stages of intensity... and nothing else. When done with the villain, it is Evil Overlooker. Often overlaps with Sean Connery Is About to Shoot You.

The style became ubiquitous once the age of photo editing software came about, since it meant studios no longer had to commission an artist tens of thousands of dollars to paint a carefully crafted poster for them, when they could just take stock photos of the lead actor and have interns superimpose them onto any background. The same basic principle can exist with more than just a floating head, as full body group pictures splashed across the poster in different sizes and scaling creates a similar style, while maybe more crowded with more to look at it can still evoke a sense of having a generic template.

In many cases, the main film poster may be more creative because of the larger size it will be displayed at, but the VHD/DVD/Blu-Ray will have a more generic "main actor heads against a black background" design so that a potential consumer can see who is in the movie at a glance.

Compare Framed Face Opening and Stacked Characters Poster.

Not to be confused with Flying Face, when heads literally float as a magical side effect of Losing Your Head, or metaphorically as a Floating Advice Reminder, or Huge Holographic Head, or Sky Face. Or, for that matter, exploding head syndrome.

---

Examples:

Comic Books

• It's quite common in comic books, particularly back in the 60s and 70s in team books, where they'd have one character doing something interesting in the middle and every other member of the team as just a floating head watching the action.
• '30s and '40s pulp comics tended to have a Dramatis Personae on the side of the cover, usually in the form of a strip of mug shots depicting characters from multiple stories that would appear in the books.
• Spoofed for Damage Control Vol. 3 No. 1. "How many times can we do the same floating heads cover?"
• This rather cheesy cover art◊ for a Jurassic Park comic book adaptation is — excluding the raptor — comprised of nothing but floating heads on a blue background. The raptor seems comprehensibly scared.
• A not-so-uncommon appearance in Rob Liefeld comic covers.
• Peter Parker had his own version of this within the comic pages, which would appear whenever Peter was pensive or on the verge of death, showing the faces of his friends, his loved ones, and, one time, a casual friend named Josh.
• The cover of White Sand has floating heads of Praxton, Khriss and Baon overlooking the group of Sand Masters on the ground below them.

Films — Animation

• Countless movies from the Disney Animated Canon have at least one DVD or Blu-Ray case with this. The Lion King (1994) at least has an excuse with Mufasa, because he actually appeared as a floating head in-movie.
• Movies from The Renaissance Age of Animation sometimes get covers with this to follow Disney's suit.

Films — Live-Action

• Absolute Power (1997): Clint's giant disconcerted face adorns the poster.
• Alien: Resurrection and the Aliens DVD (with the Alien's head!).
• The Japanese poster of The Avengers features the team in civilian clothing, with pictures of them in crime-fighting garb from the torso up floating above them.
• One of the posters for Scorsese's The Aviator, which carried over to the DVD cover. It frankly looks like a plane being chased by a giant floating Leonardo DiCaprio head.
• After the distinctive use of logo without text for the 1989 film Batman, the marketing division apparently decided to embrace this trope. The primary posters and video covers for Batman Returns, Batman Forever, and Batman & Robin all use this approach, with the first two using variants of the logo for their teaser posters. This got dumped when the series was rebooted.
• The Dark Knight did this◊ (there was also an individual poster for each face), though it at least pulls it off with some style.
• The DVD version of Deadfall features the floating heads of Michael Biehn, Nicolas Cage, and Sarah Trigger. There's a minor case of Covers Always Lie to boot: Presumably for the sake of keeping him recognizable, the Cage head is a more recent, clean-shaven photo. However, in the film itself, Cage has a mustache and spends most of the time wearing sunglasses.
• The Fifth Element, or — as the goons call it in our page image — Guy being chased by cops and three big heads.
• The movie poster of Gang Related.
• Gangs of New York: In addition to the floating heads, the names are jumbled, so that Daniel Day-Lewis is a hot chick and Cameron Diaz has a cool moustache.
• Give My Regards to Broad Street, 2000s DVD release — taken to the minimalist extreme; the original posters also had a dash of this.
• Some posters for A Hard Day's Night, including the ones the various AHDN album covers use.
• Posters for the Harry Potter films have followed◊ this◊ on occasion.
• A slipcase edition of Independence Day was simply a flaming Earth with Will Smith's head floating above it. Thankfully, the actual cover remains the same.
• The most common poster for Iron Man did it too. This carried over to the Vanilla Edition DVD cover, and the two-disc edition has packaging exclusive to Target stores that is literally a plastic Iron Man face.◊ Iron Man 2 had two guilty posters (the third one averted it as most characters are full-bodied).
• While not technically "floating heads" per se, the DVDs of the James Bond films dumped the distinctive posters for shots of Bond with a Pistol Pose in front of the most memorable set from the film. Calling them prosaic would be an understatement. One can just tell that the marketing executives wanted to hide the age of the films by redoing all the covers (since the posters are all pretty indicative of their eras).
• Justice League (2017) posters are primarily just the main characters staring straight at the viewer. Since the selling point of the movie is the characters gathered together, it ends up proving that Tropes Are Not Bad, as with some great lighting, colors and composition, the posters were praised for evoking both Rock Band covers (such as Queen) and the iconic superhero group paintings of Alex Ross.
• K-19: The Widowmaker or Harrison Ford's head is judging you.◊ Also available with bonus Liam Neeson in some editions.
• In the 1997 informative video The Kids Guide to the Internet the kids head float around in "cyberspace".
• Kull the Conqueror: Kull and Akivasha's heads are seen in the sky on the poster.
• One of the posters for the Miley Cyrus romance movie The Last Song might just contain the most literal example ever of Floating Head Syndrome. Liam's Hemsworth's face is shown in profile, framed against the sun, with his neck cut off at the base of his jaw and skull, making it absolutely nothing but a floating decapitated head.
• DVD/Posters of all three movies of The Lord of the Rings trilogy (theatrical editions only; the special editions had polished art.)
• Utilized in the original poster◊ of Mary Poppins, which in contrast to later home video covers, emphasizes the flashy musical aspects over the fantasy aspects. This Syndrome was also utilized on DVD covers from 1998◊ and 2009.◊
• We wonder what cracked-up alternate universe Michael Moore film was viewed by the Japanese person paid to design the Floating Head to end them all.◊
• Lampshaded in The Mist: after a thunderstorm demolishes the main character's studio, destroying the (amazing) movie artwork he had been painting, he laments that instead of extending his deadline, the studio "could whip up some bad Photoshop poster in an afternoon. They do it all the time. Two big heads."
• DVD covers for Mulholland Dr. do this, up to and including The Criterion Collection release with heads hovering over Hollywood. Alongside their other releases for David Lynch films, such as for Eraserhead and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, Lynch seems to require that his films be illustrated in a simple fashion and closely to how their original posters looked for Blu-ray and DVD.
• The promotional posters for No Country for Old Men featured Llewelyn Moss as a tiny figure fleeing desperately from the looming visage of the inexorable Anton Chigurh, the composition of the image reflecting the story's contemplation of trying in vain to outrun fate. For the DVD cover? Floating Heads!
• The poster for The Patriot (2000) was a pretty big offender - as the image caption says, it looks like the soldiers are running for their lives from Mel Gibson's terrifyingly enormous face. The initial home video release also suffers from this◊, but the Extended Cut release is an aversion◊.
• The first three Pirates of the Caribbean DVDs, especially when the cast grows. The fourth one averted with either only Jack Sparrow or half-body versions of the four main characters.
• All of the movies in the Vault Disney Collection of DVDs. The Pollyanna cover looks especially bad, with the protagonist's giant head appearing in the sky above a normal-sized Pollyanna.
• The DVD cover for River's Edge. Averted with the film's actual poster◊.
• Disney ignored the excellent Art Deco poster it made for The Rocketeer and cooked up a Floating Head Syndrome cover as part of their effort to make the Lamest Home Video Releases Ever. Disney also gave The Gnome-Mobile worse.◊
• The theatrical poster for Saving Private Ryan features the heads of Tom Hanks and three other actors slightly faded into the clouds above a silhouetted soldier
• A large number of of horror films released after Scream (1996).
  • The most obvious examples are I Know What You Did Last Summer, Urban Legend, and Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later, and Scream's own sequels. So synonymous was this style with the franchise, that Scream4 even used it in 2011, despite it no longer being a trendy poster style at that point.
  • This gets alluded to in the making-of features of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003) remake. The creators said they wanted something simple, and wished to avoid the "roughly◊ five◊ kids◊ facing◊forward"◊ thing that seemed prevalent at the time.
    • Which still got a floating head poster in the form of a floating head Leatherface (with a green tint).
• The Secret (2007): The poster has David Duchovny's face over Olivia Thirlby's with a black background.
• The cover of the Silent Hill movie features the floating head of Sharon Da Silva.
• Most Star Trek movies feature this. An iconic Star Trek: The Motion Picture poster features the Enterprise beneath a pillar of rainbow light with Kirk, Ilia and Spock's head floating above it. Both Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country and Star Trek: First Contact feature similar "heads in a pillar of light," while one poster for Star Trek Beyond had a poster replicating TMP's almost exactly. Star Trek: Insurrection goes for the Evil Overlooker instead.
• Star Wars
  • The covers for the 1995 VHS and Laserdisc releases of the Original Trilogy^note the last time Fox and Lucasfilm would release the original versions on VHS and Laserdisc show the disembodied heads of Darth Vader, a Stormtrooper, and Yoda cut vertically in half, and looming over scenes from the movies.
  • All the DVDs released during the 2000s suffer from this.
  • This also applies to some of the movies' March 2020 4K Ultimate Collector's Editions, and any releases that recycle their cover art.
• The special edition DVD release of Superman: The Movie has this, along with the "deluxe editions" of the third and fourth movies. The second film's special edition DVD averted this by showing Superman flying instead of his floating head.
• A good deal of posters and DVD covers for the Terminator series are simply pictures of the title cyborg's head. Many of these show off the "part man, part machine" aspect.
• Tian Di features Andy Lau's giant floating head over the skyline of 1920s Shanghai.
• Turkish Delight: Not on the poster picture as seen on the movies' TvTropes page, but on the DVD cover◊: the two main characters' heads are really floating and tacked-onto the background.
• Unforgiven's movie poster◊ shows the heads of the major characters stacked up in a column.
• X-Men: First Class came under fire for its teaser posters featuring floating heads of James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender floating (right near the respective crotches) of a silhouette of Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen respectively.
• The DVD cover of Yellowbeard features full body shots of most of the main cast together, but it's mostly dominated by the giant floating heads of Cheech & Chong, who incidentally really only show up towards the end of the movie.

Literature

• When the Doctor Who New Adventures started, there was no requirement for the cover to literally depict a scene from the book, and the cover from the first book in the series, Timewyrm: Genesys, included the Seventh Doctor's head floating in midair. Years later, when the last book starring the Seventh Doctor, Lungbarrow, was being written, there was a thought that it should have a similar cover. Since it was now the convention that the cover should depict a scene from the book, the author added a sequence where the Doctor's Huge Holographic Head appeared over London. Then that scene wasn't used for the cover after all.
• The Doctor Who Novelisations often had the Doctor's floating head, especially on covers by Chris Achilleos who traditionally did the heads in monochrome and the rest of the picture in colour. See some examples here.
• All three books of The Flight Engineer feature co-author James Doohan's head. Which is rather odd considering that the character who's most like Scotty isn't the hero. The third book adds the head of a Fibian.
• No live actors represented, but the cover◊ to Galaxy of Fear: Ghost of the Jedi has floating heads of Darth Vader and Aiden Bok in the background. Bok might be understandable, as he's the eponymous ghost, but Vader?
• Isaac Asimov's The Rest of the Robots:
  • The 1968 Panther cover has a pink/red robot head in the centre of the cover and eight translucent duplicates around it, all on a black background.
  • The 2018 Harper Collins cover has a yellow robot head in the centre of the cover and six duplicates around it, all on a dynamic purple background.
• The original paperback cover for Return of the Living Dead had a giant disembodied zombie head and hands looming behind a woman in a black void, seemingly about to grab her. Overlaps with Evil Overlooker, what with the zombies being the villains and all.
• This was a common cover design for almost all of the Star Trek novels of the nineties.
  • The cover of Star Trek: Federation had Captains Kirk and Picard from the shoulders up and not much else.
  • It fell out of favor by the mid-00's, though the Star Trek: Typhon Pact novels revived it for a time.
  • One of the Star Trek: The Next Generation numbered novels, Imbalance, had Crusher and Riker's heads floating over the Jarada's city.

Live-Action TV

• Angel: On the British DVD boxsets, the covers tend to be floating busts but every single disc has a floating Angel head. All doing the same "Am I brooding or did I leave the iron on?" face, but separate images. You'd guess the camera team got drunk and did a giant photoshoot of this one expression at different angles, then realized they had to do something with it.
• The Sony Bewitched DVDs had covers that each showed large versions of Samantha, Darrin, and Endora (and in later seasons, Sam's and Darrin's children as well) looming above a cartoonish city, usually cut off from either the torso up, or the shoulders up. The box for Sony's DVD of the complete series instead had a full-body shot of Sam's Animated Credits Opening self as its focal image, but did have little bordered pictures of actors' heads on the bottom.
• When serials from the classic Doctor Who series were released on VHS in the 1990s, most of them had beautiful paintings commissioned specially for them. After 1997, this stopped.
  • The cover◊ of the Limited Edition of the Series 6 boxset consists of only a giant floating Silent head in a pitch black background. (For the sake of contrast, the regular edition's cover is a non-beheaded group shot.◊)
• One of the boxes of Smallville DVDs only has the faces of Clark, Lana and Lex on it.

Magazine

• Analog:
  • In the April 1940 issue, on page 101 for "Reincarnate", a skull floats in the centre of a full-page explosion, with lightning and particles radiating away from it.
  • The cover of the April 1944 issue, advertising A.E. van Vogt's "The Changeling", has a central face/head with normal colouration for a caucasion, and six others heads that are monochrome imitations of the central face with slight changes, implying the ability to change shape.
  • The cover of the June 1951 issue, advertising Eric Frank Russell's ". . .And Then There Were None", had seven floating heads and a floating bicycle above a landscape of a lake and mountains.
  • The cover of the July 1951 issue, advertising James Schmitz's "The End Of The Line", has a male and female face floating in front of a vertical cigar-shaped silver rocket where people were in line to board.
  • The cover of the August 1951 issue, advertising MC Pease's "City Of The Phoenix", has a disembodied head and two disembodied hands that overlook a spiral galaxy.
  • The cover of the April 1952 issue, advertising Walter M. Miller, Jr.'s "Dumb Waiter", has the heads of a man and woman staring imperiously down at a boy on a bicycle.
  • The cover of the September 1960 issue, advertising David Gordon's "By Proxy", shows a human face floating in front of a blue-skinned alien face, both above a horizontal cigar-shaped white and red rocket on stilts like a boat.
  • The cover of the May 1970 issue, advertising John Dalmas's "But Mainly By Cunning", has the floating heads of a wolf and a woman in the background sky above a viking-inspired knight on horseback.
  • The cover of the March 1974 issue, advertising Jerry Pournelle's "High Justice", had a female face with a blue-green tint in the background.

Music

• A few Kraftwerk albums have this, namely Computer World and Electric Cafe.
• Little Games by The Yardbirds shows the band members as floating heads on a psychedelic art work cover.
• Phil Collins has his head in the red light on his No Jacket Required Album. Also appears in the music video for his greatest hit "In the Air Tonight" to intercut with Phil wandering down the corridor full of doors.
• Scorpions: The original album cover of Taken by Force featured the band in a cemetery, but it was replaced by a black background with stock photos of the band.
• More than one of Michael Bolton's albums qualifies, including Time, Love, and Tenderness.
• With the Beatles has the four band members' faces half-lit in darkness, with Ringo just below the other three.
• Real Life by Magazine had a disturbingly different sort of Floating Heads cover.◊

Pinball

• Stern's Ali has Muhammad Ali's head floating on both the backglass and playfield art.
• Gottlieb's The Amazing Spider-Man does this with Spidey's supporting characters, who are shown on the playfield as a set of floating heads before a set of clouds.
• The playfield for Seawitch has the disembodied head of a Seawitch glaring at the player.
• The "Vengeance Premium" edition of Stern Pinball's Star Trek features the heads of various characters floating above and around the Narada and the Vengeance.

Theme Parks

• Much of the promotional material for Skull Island: Reign of Kong at Universal's Islands of Adventure shows Kong's head floating above Skull Island.

Video Games

• This is pretty much the entirety of the logos for Five Nights at Freddy's 2; it's just Freddy's smiling face next to the title.^note And, as a side note, the Steam banner does away with the title, instead opting to assume Freddy's head will be enough. It worked... and propelled the game to the #1 Best Selling Game spot.
• Some of the Freedom Force loading screens (in game comic book covers) feature these as parodies of Silver Age comics.
• The F-Zero series has this, notably F-Zero X, which features Captain Falcon's angry face on the center of the cover.
• Halo 5: Guardians has a downplayed variant, with the box art showing Locke and Master Chief's heads and chests on opposite sides of the image, and in the center, a Guardian.
• Yahtzee writes on the subject on this Extra Punctuation, touching on Heavy Rain, ICO, Another World and others, as part of a column bemoaning how American cover art is almost invariably of poorer quality than its international equivalents.
• Most of the covers for the NES Mega Man (Classic) games' Japanese versions had this, for the Robot Masters (from Mega Man 2 onwards). However, this is a positive case, as they are considered universally better than their overseas counterparts. When Mega Man 9 and Mega Man 10 came out as throwbacks to that era, this design philosophy was preserved for their covers.
• Metroid: Other M has a cover with the heads of Samus and Adam, along with young Samus in almost full-body profile.
• Planescape: Torment had one of these on its cover.
• One of the covers for Resident Evil – Code: Veronica consists of nothing but Claire's face. The default cover just consists of Claire and Chris from the shoulders up, against a moody blue-hued background - and re-releases of the game add in a faint image of Wesker's floating head in between them.
• The cover of Tomb Raider: Legend consists entirely of Lara's head, most likely to show off her re-design.
• Used for the "Movie Poster" photo backdrop in Tomodachi Life.

Web Original

• A number of these get lambasted in Why Do Great Movies Get Awful DVD Cover Art?
• Also, see this awesome video for a look at the process of making the floating head poster.

---