All of which goes to show just how powerful invisible poster shorthand can be the design choices, colour schemes and typefaces that make us subliminally categorise a film as something we might like, or not, long before we discover anything about it. The design of the Cuties image invokes those grim pre-pubescent beauty pageants, but also contemporary dance films such as the Step Up series, in which the dancers physicality and, lets be honest, bodies are a major part of the draw.

These in turn hark back to the promotional imagery for 1980s classics such as Dirty Dancing, Flashdance and Footloose: its a way of stirring up a certain longstanding craving in prospective viewers, and then suggesting this new film can satisfy it. (Again, you can see where the yuck sensation comes from.) There are similar trends all over the marketplace: orange and blue colour schemes for stylish action films; large, red, jolly fonts for wacky lowbrow comedies; couples leaning against each other for rom-coms with a battle-of-the-sexes element; two people on a bench for a twist-of-fate romance; a hero (or anti-hero) with his back turned to the camera for blockbuster grit; and so on.

In early 2013, Peter Stricklands experimental horror film Berberian Sound Studio was released on DVD and Blu-ray with two different covers. One was on the Artificial Eye arthouse label, which reflected the tone of the film perfectly with unsettling, Man Ray-like imagery of star Toby Joness head being deconstructed to reveal a staring woman inside. The other was for Asda, which positioned it as a kind of Saw knock-off: a black and white image of a screaming girl, no sign of Jones at all beyond a pair of disembodied eyes, the title in a blood-splattered industrial carnage-style font, and the tagline Terror inhabits the scream.

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What the Cuties controversy teaches Hollywood - get the poster right - Telegraph.co.uk