A series of posters promoting Roland Joffé’s Captivity, a thriller starring Elisha Cuthbert has been pulled following complaints, according to The Hollywood Reporter (via and).

The billboards, first posted March 13, feature four frames with captions above each one. “Abduction” shows Cuthbert with a gloved hand over her face; “Confinement” features the actress behind a chain-link fence with a bloody finger poking through; “Torture” depicts Cuthbert’s face, covered in white gauze, with tubes shoved up her nose; and “Termination” shows her with her head thrown back, seemingly dead.

The adverts appeared on 30 Los Angeles-area billboards and 1,400 New York taxi tops. After Dark - one of the distributors of the film - is paying to have them removed and has promised to have them all down by 2:00pm. Co-distributor, Lions Gate has backed away from the issue, saying that it had no involvement with the adverts and that all of the marketing for the film was being handled solely by After Dark.

The posters were not approved by the MPAA and After Dark are saying that they used the wrong ones by mistake. The MPAA has not yet decided how to deal with the issue but, according to one source, the ratings organisation could decide to refuse to issue the film a rating, effectively banning it from multiplexes which raises a whole bunch of questions about back-door censorship and whether film ratings organisations should also be responsible for advertising standards.

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