Poster Design: The Art of Horror

Before you go into a movie theatre, what is usually the first thing you see as you go in? The movie posters lining the walls, which are supposed to attract you inside, of course. In today's world, computers have made graphic design such an easy task, but before you could make art with a few clicks of a mouse, most of these posters were hand-drawn, completely created by the designers from scratch to make beautiful works of art. Since horror is the topic of the month, I'm going to focus on two horror artists in particular: Reynold Brown and Saul Bass.

Saul Bass is probably most famous for the designing of several Hitchcock movie posters including Vertigo, North by Northwest, and Psycho. He also worked on two drama posters for The Man with the Golden Arm and Anatomy of a Murder. Bass did some famous non-horror posters as well, such as the ones for Carmen Jones, Around the World in Eighty Days, The Seven Year Itch and The Big Country. Bass's career spanned forty years and in addition to posters, he also did film title sequences and company logos. Bass worked for such legendary directors as Hitchcock, Kubrick, Sorcsese and Preminger. His posters all have a unique style to them.

Another famous artist who did several horror posters is Reynold Brown. Brown's posters were wide range from different genres, ages, and success levels. Many of his beautifully done posters are b-movies, though the posters themselves are Grade A. His posters include ones done for Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Incredible Shrinking Man, Pit and the Pendulum, House on Haunted Hill, Tarantula, I Was A Teenage Werewolf, Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, and The Time Machine. Some of his famous non-horror posters include Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Spartacus, Ben-Hur, King of Kinds, How the West Was Won, Mutiny on the Bounty, and The Alamo.

In the past few decades, collecting vintage film memorabilia, especially these posters, has become an incredibly competitive commercial market. Many such

posters are extremely rare and it is common for people to screen printer illegal or unlicensed copies of them to sell. To date, the most expensive movie poster sold on record was the one made for Fritz Lang's Metropolis, which sold to a collector for $690,000. Serious collectors are willing to drop some major cash in order to add to their collection, but that doesn't mean you can't see these beautiful works of art for yourself.

I have found several websites that have excellent online galleries and stores for you to buy posters (both actual and replicas), if any of you are interested. Cinemacom.com has a wonderful collection of beautiful posters that you can view for free in their online galleries.

Cinemasterpieces.com buys, sells, and auctions posters, but you can look at them online for free. The site Hammerhorrorposters.com has several horror posters for you to view, histories of the posters, and is a great resource if you want to know more about the posters or collecting them. Movie posters even have their own awards, the Key Art Awards sponsored by The Hollywood Reporter on the internet is the Internet Movie Poster Awards (IMP Awards) and here you can view several award nominated and revered poster artists.