A Love Affair With Vintage Posters

Staring Jennifer Wells

Some people would call them tacky, squalid, unwholesome, subversive, funny, and horribly fascinating. I fall in the pigeonhole of the latter as I like the old vintage film posters from the 60s and 70s with a particular interest in porn film posters from that era. I use to blog them a lot along with on my other blog a long with Hammer Horror posters also a favourite of mine and more recently, I have a growing interest in Japanese horror posters.

These days’ film posters are sanitised to boredom and it’s the case of many try too hard. The porn ones can be abysmally smutty and just don't past muster these days with censorship and the right on PC brigade. Back in time they would feature outside cinemas nearly always with some scantily woman in a state of undress or danger with some provocative statement like, “she was asking for it”. Behind the Green Door famously had the wording “A Smell of Honey, A Swallow of Brine” on its poster. They seemed to cater for the male of the species in this genre.

The another Gordon

Hammer horror are all blood and guts with monsters the likes of Frankenstein and Dracula. Flipping two fingers at all notions of subtlety and elegance. Hammer posters were wilfully chaotic, crowded with cartoon-like figures and with typefaces designed to replicate dribbling blood. The taglines were appalling and brilliant: "Beware the beat of the cloth-wrapped feet!" shrieked the poster for The Mummy's Shroud, while Taste the Blood of Dracula exhorted viewers to "Drink a Pint of Blood a Day!" The majority of posters would normally have some damsel in distress barely dressed and showing plenty of cleavage.

Three Evil Dead posters, old, new and Japanese

Classic Hammer Horror poster

I was younger when in town shopping with mum or dad I would always sneak a furtive look has we walked pass has they were adult films.

A favourite

Japanese posters came later into my live thanks to the film Battle Royale one of my favourite films. The film tells the story of junior high school students who are forced to fight each other to the death on an island somewhere in the Far East in a program run by the authoritarian Japanese government. The poster is not overly specials but it open the door to Japanese pop art in general in the gene of films. I had already read and seen Manga comics and videos, which are very popular, but it the poster and film that caught my eye more.

Maybe one day the wife will let me cover the walls with them.