Movie Posters: The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms

With my movie poster job completed, I thought I'd wrap up my look back at my favorite posters this week, with my hands-down, no-doubt-about-it all-time favorite movie poster ever!

I can't remember the first time I ever saw this poster--I know I saw the movie first--but I know that when I first laid eyes on it, it grabbed me and never let go. The design, the use of color, the font choices--all of it is, to me, perfect. It makes a (to me) only so-so movie look like it is The Greatest, Most Exciting Film of All Time, and of course that's its job.

I've never been able to learn who designed and illustrated this masterpiece. I guess its a safe bet they are no longer with us--too bad: I owe whoever it was a beer.

A few beers, actually, since I ripped off this poster's overall design (and even some of the artwork) for the Sci-Fi and Fantasy Titles Catalog I designed back in 1999 when I worked for Koen Book Distributors:

...this is my favorite of all the catalogs I designed during my year at Koen. I had little flying saucers buzzing the text throughout, and a tribute to great sci-fi authors on the inside cover--I went to town on this baby!


The poster I put together--for a horror movie called Closed For The Season--will show up here tomorrow!

Movie Posters: King Kong

Of the approximately eleventy-billion different King Kong posters there are out there, this one is by far my favorite--I saw it in a book called Reel Art I got about twenty years ago, and it was one of a whole bunch of Kong posters.

I love the colors--like New York is Hell itself (which, from Kong's point of view, it was), the cartoony boldness of the logo, and that amazing perspective. The pure fury of Kong is unleashed here, and its another one of those posters that makes me long for the day I can create something a tenth as good.

Movie Posters: Out of Sight

I remember seeing this poster in a movie theater, a few months before Out of Sight came out in the Summer of 1998, and I was immediately struck by how beautiful it was--I was grabbed its old school, 60s-esque look, and it made me want to see the movie more than I already did.

I love the old-timey quotes around movie's title, the juxtaposition of the two main stars (and not showing Jennifer Lopez's face--I wonder how J-Lo felt about that!), the rounded corners, and the monochromatic color scheme. The whole thing just works.

I see so few modern movie posters that are more than just a collection of Giant Movie Star Heads, so when someone tries to do something different I try and follow how that movie does at the box office. If a movie with an unusual poster flops, odds are someone in Hollywood will say "That's what we get for doing that kind of poster!", and then the chances of another studio taking an artistic chance like that gets even slimmer.

Despite the big stars, big name source material, and it just being a really good movie, Out of Sight famously didn't do all that well. Luckily, over time audiences have discovered the film, and now its considered one of George Clooney' best. Its certainly one of my all-time favorite movie posters of the last twenty years.

Movie Posters: Bordertown

No, this is not an example of my work after I went back in time to the 1930s and designed movie posters for Warner Bros.!

This poster, for the 1937 Bette Davis film Bordertown, is one of my all-time favorite movie one-sheets, and I'm posting it here because I'm currently hard at work on a movie poster for a small, independent horror movie.

I've pulled all my movie poster books off the shelf and have been looking over them to try and soak up some inspiration. So I thought while I'm in the process of working on the poster, I'd occasionally post some of my all-time favorites, the kind of posters that were and are huge artistic inspirations for me.

The use of color, design, fonts, and character on this poster is to me, nigh-perfect. I love how Ms. Davis disappears into the red stripe, but also breaks those borders and dominates the poster. Paul Muni may be getting top billing, but the poster tells you who's the star.

I've never even seen Bordertown, and I'm pretty sure there's no way it could live up to this poster!