Design the Poster for ‘Key of Bones: Curse of the Ghost Pirate’ and Win $1,000

Any medium. No restrictions. Entries close August 15 — and the iHorror fanbase picks the winner.

A storm washes cursed pirate coins onto a Key West beach. A tourist stiffs his waitress with one. That’s all it takes to wake Anne Bonny, dead three hundred years and furious about it.

Key of Bones: Curse of the Ghost Pirate is a paranormal pirate movie with a possessed drag queen, a lesbian pirate love story, a ghost tour guide horrified to discover he was right all along, and a body count the tourism board would rather not discuss. It premieres this fall, and we want to include you in on the fun.

We’ve spent a decade spotlighting artists nobody has heard of yet. This time there’s a thousand dollars attached.

One thing worth saying plainly: this isn’t replacing anybody’s job. Key of Bones already has a professional poster designer hard at work on the film’s official key art, and there will be more than one poster before the film releases. This contest runs alongside that, not instead of it — a second track built specifically for artists who don’t have an agent or a studio credit to get them in the room.

So: an open poster contest. No fence around it. Any medium. Any style. Digital, oil, ink, screen print, collage, embroidery, woodcut, airbrushed on the hood of a car. If it can be photographed and it reads as a poster, we want to see it.

One winner takes $1,000. And we’re not the ones handing it out. You are.

The Deal

Here’s the whole thing, start to finish:

1. You make a poster for Key of Bones: Curse of the Ghost Pirate. Any medium, any interpretation.
2. You email it to us at Contest@iHorror.com by 11:59 PM ET on Saturday, August 15, 2026.
3. We pick the top five. This is the only decision we make. We’re looking for the five pieces that hit hardest, not the five that look the most like a studio one-sheet.
4. The five go up on iHorror’s Facebook and Instagram on Saturday, August 22.
5. The fanbase votes with likes. Facebook and Instagram totals combined. Voting closes 11:59 PM ET on Saturday, September 5.
6. Most likes wins $1,000. Winner announced Labor Day, Monday, September 7.

That’s it. No entry fee. No age limit. No professional/amateur split. No “must be a resident of.” Make a thing, send it in.

You have eighteen days. Time to get started.

The fine print, such as it is

• Submit as a high-res JPG or PNG, at least 2000px on the long edge. Portrait orientation is traditional for a poster but we’re not going to tell you what to do.
• Physical work? Photograph or scan it cleanly and send that. Don’t mail us a canvas.
• Include in your email: your name, the name you want credited (handle is fine), your city/country, your social links, and one or two sentences about your piece. If you make the top five, all of it goes up with your poster.
• Limit three entries per artist. Pick your best.
• You keep your art. You own your piece before this contest, during it, and after it. Nothing here changes that. You can sell prints, put it in your portfolio, license it elsewhere, do whatever you want with it — winning or losing.
• What entering gives us. Every entry grants iHorror and the Key of Bones production permission to show your piece — on the site, on social, in press about the contest — always with your name and links attached.
• What winning gives us. The $1,000 winner grants us something broader: the right to actually sell the design. Posters, shirts, whatever we come up with. You keep selling it too — this is not exclusive, and it never becomes ours. If we print your poster, you can print the same poster. In plain terms: we pay you $1,000, both of us can make money off it, and your name goes on every version we produce.
• Every medium means every medium — including AI. We’re not drawing a line here, and we want to be straightforward about why. This contest runs on the premise that we don’t decide, you do. Putting our thumb on the scale about tools would make that a lie. So AI-generated and AI-assisted entries are eligible, same as everything else. All we ask is that you tell us in your email if you used it, and we’ll note it when we post the top five. Some of our readers will hold that against an entry. Some won’t. Both of those are legitimate votes, and it’s genuinely not our call to make.
• Vote honestly. Rally your friends, your followers, your group chat — that’s the whole point. But purchased likes, bot activity, and engagement farms will get an entry disqualified. We can see it, and so can everyone else. The license, in legal language, so nobody has to guess:

The contest winner grants the organizer a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license to reproduce, display, distribute, market, and sell the submitted artwork, including on prints, apparel, and other merchandise. The artist retains full ownership of the work and all rights to exploit it independently. All other entrants grant the organizer a non-exclusive license to display and promote their submitted artwork in connection with the contest and the film, with artist credit.

So What Is the Movie?

Key of Bones: Curse of the Ghost Pirate was shot entirely on location in Key West, Florida — one of only a handful of feature films shot solely on the island in the past twenty years. It screened at the Fantastic Pavilion Gala at Cannes’ Marché du Film in May, and it premieres at the Tennessee Williams Theatre in Key West on October 2.

The story:

Cursed pirate coins wash up on a Key West beach after a big storm. Christie, a loudmouth tourist, ends up with one — and leaves it as a tip for Mary, a waitress living on a houseboat. It’s a lousy tip. It’s also, unknown to either of them, the thing that resurrects Anne Bonny — the real 18th-century pirate, murdered in the early 1700s and torn away from her lover, Mary Read.

Anne comes back angry. She wants the treasure that was stolen from her, and she wants Mary Read. And Mary the waitress happens to be Mary Read’s descendant, which puts her directly at the center of a three-hundred-year-old grudge she had no part in starting.

Christie’s vacation turns into a massacre, and the tourist who passed along that bad tip ends up helping Mary fight what the cursed coins unleashed. They pick up Dave, a ghost-tour operator and occult expert who shows up with real historical knowledge and a pile of paranormal tech. They have until New Year’s Eve.

Anne, meanwhile, is building a crew. Desiree, a drag performer possessed and turned into a supernatural enforcer. Ezekiel, a formerly enslaved man dragged back from the dead and bound to Anne’s will. Against them, Barbara Mabrity— the ghost of a lighthouse keeper and one of the island’s oldest protectors.

The Tone

This is the part that will make or break your poster, so we’re going to be specific.

Director Tony Armer’s own pitch: Shaun of the Dead meets The Goonies meets Pirates of the Caribbean. He also cites the Abbott and Costello horror-comedies as a direct influence.

Note what’s not in that list: parody. Key of Bones isn’t a spoof — it isn’t making fun of ghost pirate movies, it’s fully committed to being one. But it isn’t solemn about it either. There’s camp in here, and gore, and jokes, frequently in the same shot. You’re laughing thirty seconds before something genuinely awful happens, which is exactly what makes the awful thing land.

If we had to describe the target in one line: fun, with something terrible in it.

Some texture you can play with. None of it is a requirement — these are notes, not a brief:

• Blood-soaked and darkly funny at the same time, not alternating
• Daylight horror. Most of this movie happens in the sun — hard tropical light, turquoise water, pastel storefronts, and three hundred years of shipwrecks underneath all of it. Worth knowing before you reach for a dark palette out of habit.
• Genuinely tragic underneath. Anne Bonny is a monster and a grieving woman. Desiree’s possession is body horror about losing yourself. Ezekiel ties the curse to real historical wounds.
• Adventure, not just dread. There are fights on beaches. There is treasure.

Ignore all of it if you have a better idea. We opened the contest to fans because we wanted to be surprised. The winning entry will likely be something none of us would have ever thought to request.

One writeup summarized the plot as “drag queens, lesbian pirate ghosts, and cursed treasure,” which is either an accurate description of any given Saturday in Key West or the most efficient logline of the year.

A note on the mythology: Anne Bonny and Mary Read were real. They sailed with Calico Jack, were captured together in 1720, and are among the most documented female pirates in history. The film didn’t invent them. If you want to dig into the actual historical record for your piece, the material is there and it’s stranger than fiction.

Inspiration Bundle

Further Reading & More Images

If you want more to chew on before you start:

One Last Thing

The best horror posters ever made weren’t made by committee. Drew Struzan drew The Thing by hand. The Suspiria one-sheet is a painting. Half the reason people still talk about grindhouse art is that somebody with a brush made a choice nobody would approve in a meeting today.

We’re not going to approve anything. We’re going to pick five, put them in front of the horror fans who have been reading this site for years, and let them decide.

The winner gets announced on Labor Day — three and a half weeks before Key of Bones premieres in Key West. Make something we would have written about.

Deadline: 11:59 PM ET, Saturday, August 15, 2026. Submit to Contest@iHorror.com.

Key of Bones: Curse of the Ghost Pirate premieres October 2, 2026 at the Tennessee Williams Theatre in Key West, Florida, with a public screening October 3. Written and directed by Tony Armer. Produced in partnership with iHorror.