MY POSTER PAST :: part 3

Shortly before my short-lived stretch of string bikini supermodels dominating my dojo, my first attempt at professing my maturity was with horror movie posters.
But it wasn't just about securing my manhood via wall art - the early 90s were when I began to hookup with horror in a more tangible way: books, magazines, stickers, video games, action figures, home video, and anything else aimed at an 8-12 year old had its own horror niche. Added to that, accessibility to actually viewing these movies had opened wide - partly due to a wave of mainstream shockers post-Silence of the Lambs, while on the other end of that, the direct-to-video market was moving directly to cable.
And with the corpses of Freddy and Jason still warm, I turned my attention to the resurrections of Frankenstein's Monster, the Wolf Man, and most of all, Count Dracula.
The classic Universal Monsters lineup were like the collective Santa Claus of the Halloween holiday - their mugs adorn every decoration, candy wrapper, makeup kit, and TV commercial the season throws at us. Because of that, I grew up with the same creatures of the night that multiple generations before and after me have - I was just fortunate enough to get these glossy, brand new adaptations right at the right time - and the posters to match!

- Paul

Bram Stoker's Dracula

This movie had an entire series of prints that you could get in stores, and make no mistake, I got 'em all. Some were cooler than others (the best was a horizontal one featuring a Mt. Rushmore of all the Count's incarnations - including the green mist!) but this iconic one-sheet was the first - and held on the longest.
Imagine: artwork designed exclusively for the poster with typography and imagery that doesn't appear in the film. And what's more is the absence of its impressive ensemble of big stars above the title - just the name of the most famous monster in all of fiction and his creator.

Mary Shelley's Frankenstien 

Another elegantly minimalist approach. In fact, all that was said about Dracula's marketing applies right here. The mostly-solid black image looked great on glossy poster paper, but the smallest wrinkle or blemish was punctuated that much more, and a couple humid summers left it looking a bit like DeNiro's Monster.

From Dusk Till Dawn

Picked this up for free at the video store out of a box full of last season's new releases, and right at the tail end of my brief obsession with the film.
I've always been pretty snobby about 'video posters' - largely because they bypass the original theatrical art for the clunky video box image. So, I threw it on the back of my bedroom door.
Still, the barrel of Clooney's gun is impressive in poster-size scale.

In The Mouth of Madness

Another video store freebie.
It was a thrill to get a really real contemporary scary movie poster from the Master of Horror. The only problem was I'd yet to actually see the movie - as a devoted Fangoria collector, I'd been reading about it for ages & felt like I knew it well, but my OCD wouldn't allow me to hang a poster for a movie I'd not seen. Conveniently it was available on pay-per-view that very evening, and the rest, as they say, belongs to Sutter Cane.