Old Horror Movie Posters: Universal, Hammer and the Drive-In Years

The monster on the poster is almost never the monster in the film. Look at a Universal teaser from 1931 and Boris Karloff’s creature looms like a giant over a terrified crowd. Look at a 1950s drive-in sheet and a creature the size of a skyscraper is carrying off a woman in a nightgown, while the actual film offers a man in a rubber suit for a few minutes near the end. Old horror movie posters were in the business of promising more than any film could deliver, and that is exactly why they are so much fun to study.

This is a tour of three great periods of horror poster art: Universal in the 1930s and 1940s, Hammer in Britain from the late 1950s, and the American drive-in and exploitation films of the 1950s and 1960s.

Universal’s monsters: shadows and saturated color

Universal’s horror cycle began in earnest with Dracula (1931), directed by Tod Browning with Bela Lugosi, and Frankenstein (1931), directed by James Whale with Boris Karloff. It continued with The Mummy (1932), The Invisible Man (1933) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935), among others.

The studio’s art director for much of the 1930s, Karoly Grosz, oversaw the advertising for these films and is credited with many of their posters. What makes the early Universal posters striking is that they are often in vivid, almost lurid color for films that were shot in black and white. Greens, oranges and deep purples surround the monsters; figures are stylized and elongated; the lettering is often as dramatic as the artwork. The posters had to suggest an experience the audience had never seen before, without giving away the creature’s look too clearly.

Very few early Universal horror posters survive, because theater paper was meant to be used up and discarded. Much of what people know of these campaigns comes from a small number of surviving sheets, from pressbooks and from lobby cards. If you want to know how those cards worked, see my guide to what lobby cards are.

The 1940s: sequels and monster rallies

By the 1940s Universal’s horror films were increasingly sequels, crossovers and comedies, beginning with The Wolf Man (1941) and running through films that put several monsters on one bill. The posters followed. Instead of a single brooding image, they crowded the frame with every creature the studio could fit, each in its own pool of color, like a lineup. They are less mysterious than the early posters, but they capture the cheerful showmanship of the period.

Reissues: the monsters come back on new paper

Horror films were reliable reissue material, and that matters for anyone looking at old posters. In 1938 Universal brought Dracula and Frankenstein back to theaters as a double feature, and the success of that revival is generally credited with encouraging the studio to return to the genre with Son of Frankenstein (1939). Reissues meant new posters, new lobby cards and new taglines, often in a cruder, punchier style than the originals.

The monsters got another second life in 1957, when Universal’s horror library was packaged for television, and a new generation discovered the films on late-night local stations. The following year the magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland began publication, and it reproduced stills and poster art for readers who had never seen the original campaigns. Much of the popular memory of the Universal posters comes from that period of rediscovery rather than from the original releases.

The practical lesson is simple. A poster for a 1931 film is not necessarily from 1931. Re-release paper is genuine theater material in its own right, but it belongs to a different moment, and in the National Screen Service era its stock number usually carried an “R” prefix to say so.

Why the posters are lurid when the films are restrained

Watch the early Universal films today and many of their scariest moments happen off screen or in shadow. The posters could not rely on suggestion in the same way. A one-sheet had a few seconds to stop someone on a sidewalk, so it pushed color, scale and menace as far as the studio’s taste allowed. That gap between a quiet film and a loud poster is one of the most consistent features of the genre’s paper.

Hammer: Gothic in blood-red Technicolor

In 1957 the British company Hammer Film Productions released The Curse of Frankenstein, directed by Terence Fisher, with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. It was a color Gothic horror film, and it changed the genre’s look. Dracula followed in 1958, released in the United States as Horror of Dracula.

Hammer’s posters leaned on what color film could now show: red. Blood, capes, lips and lettering came in strong reds against black backgrounds, often with a woman in a low-cut gown as the threatened figure. British posters made a point of the X certificate, the adults-only rating of the time, turning a restriction into a selling point.

Because the main British cinema poster was the landscape quad, Hammer’s British campaigns often look quite different from the American one-sheets for the same films, which were prepared for a different market and shape. In the second half of the 1960s, the illustrator Tom Chantrell designed many of Hammer’s British posters, including the quad for Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (1968). His work is painterly, crowded with incident and very good at suggesting sensation without showing much.

The drive-in era: the poster came first

In 1950s America, a wave of low-budget science fiction and horror films was aimed squarely at teenagers, often for double bills at drive-ins and neighborhood theaters. The posters for these films are where exaggeration became an art form.

American International Pictures is the classic example. The company has often been described as working backward: coming up with a title and a poster concept first, testing interest, and only then making the film. Albert Kallis served as the company’s art director in this period and is associated with many of its posters, though attributions for individual 1950s campaigns are sometimes disputed among collectors and historians.

Reynold Brown painted some of the best-known posters of the period, including Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958), and is widely credited with the poster for Universal’s Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954). His figures are anatomically convincing, which makes their impossible scale all the more effective.

Gimmicks on paper: William Castle

The producer and director William Castle turned the poster into a carnival barker. For House on Haunted Hill (1959) he promoted “Emergo,” a skeleton that floated over the audience on a wire in some theaters. For The Tingler (1959) he promoted “Percepto,” a buzzer effect wired into some seats. The posters and lobby displays made those gimmicks the main attraction, sometimes more prominently than the stars.

Late 1960s: the photograph takes over

George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) pointed toward a different kind of horror marketing: grim, documentary-like and built on photographs rather than paintings. As the 1970s went on, horror posters increasingly used photography, stark type and a single disturbing image, although painted art never disappeared from the genre.

A quick guide to the eras

How to read a horror poster

• Find the victim. Most horror posters are built around a threatened figure, and who that figure is tells you who the film was aimed at.
• Measure the monster. The more out of scale the creature, the more likely the poster is compensating for a small budget.
• Read the tagline and the fine print. Warnings, guarantees and certificates were marketing, not public service.
• Compare countries. The same film in an American one-sheet and a British quad can look like two different movies; see movie poster sizes for why the shapes differ.

There is also something touching about these posters. They were made quickly, by working commercial artists, to fill seats for a week or two. Many of the films they advertised are forgotten, while the art has outlived them. A few of those forgotten films deserve a second look, and I have listed some in underrated horror movies.