Exploitation Movie Posters

Nothing is more satisfying than snubbing the gold-plated visage of Hollywood and occasionally cashing in your film morals to watch something along the lines of Astro Zombies – The movie equivalent of writing your name in your own shit… on your neighbours lawn. Hollywood drives us to watch these films as an antidote. It is, in its own way, solely responsible for the counter-culture of lo-budget exploitation films. Hollywood occasionally even cheekily borrows from the exploitation genre. See ‘Mars Attacks’ for one blaring example.

But what’s most iconic for me about the exploitation genre is the glorious plethora of film posters and movie ephemera that has been bequeathed to us over the years. Most of it was hand-painted and roughly photographed. Most of it was bizarrely unrepresentative of the film it actually advertised and most of it was relentlessly tongue-in-cheek. I recently got my hands on a copy of Trash: The Graphic Genius of Xploitation Movie Poster Art, a venerable collection of some of the finest film posters the genre has ever seen (and possibly ever will). There are genius examples of poster styles that are truly missed in the film industry today. The original and supremely camp Mad Max poster is something to behold in itself.

What I love about these works is that there was no real design benchmark, no industry standard and no boundaries to define how the designers could portray the movie. Anything went. Which is ironic, considering many of these films were eventually distributed by large Hollywood film companies. Either way, the legacy for me is clear, if I ever made a film, it would definitely have a two-headed genetic-mutation riding a motorbike on its poster too. Naturally.

Check one of my old posts on a vintage Swedish VHS cover collection or have a peek at this rather succinct article about Alan Aldridge – The man behind the iconic ‘Chelsea Girls’ poster.