Page 8 - Hammer Shock - Picture Palace Movie Posters

Indeed, Noël represents the tip of the iceberg where continental artists are concerned, with many French,
Belgian and Italian posters for British horror films remaining among the most beautiful ever designed. Several of
these artists were also commissioned for the UK market, notably Italy's Renato Fratini, whose posters for
Hammer's The Phantom of the Opera and the non-Hammer Theatre of Death are especially memorable.

Among other things, the artwork assembled here points up the degree to which Hammer attracted potential
rivals almost immediately. Barely had Hammer's first Gothic hit, The Curse of Frankenstein, made its money-
spinning debut than that grand old British monster, Boris Karloff, was transported to Walton-on-Thames to star

in the Producers Associates film Grip of the Strangler, whose advertising remains basic enough but
nevertheless incorporates those three essentials: the clutching hand, the squint-eyed stalker (Karloff, of course)
and the shrinking victim (Vera Day, in this case). And in no time at all, Anglo Amalgamated were sponsoring
films that vied with Hammer in the critic-baiting sadism stakes. The splendid Circus of Horrors ('See It and
Gasp!') was made at Beaconsfield and inspired a really lovely Big Top-style poster, while the much more

sophisticated Peeping Tom - shot at Pinewood and advertised with a memorably baleful staring eye - caused
such a wave of revulsion in 1960 that the career of its distinguished director, Michael Powell, never quite
recovered.

As the British horror boom developed in the 1960s, so too, under the influence of a new wave of artists, did the
accompanying poster campaigns. Names like Vic Fair, Mike Vaughan and - pre-eminently - Tom Chantrell came
to the fore. It was Chantrell who foregrounded Peter Cushing's fine-boned features in the artwork for
Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed and added seeping rivers of red to his arresting design for Taste the Blood of

Dracula (a motif he would cheerfully recycle in several posters thereafter). Vaughan created stunning posters
for a 1971 double-feature comprising Hands of the Ripper and Twins of Evil, while Fair’s playful designs for
Vampire Circus and the (non-Hammer) Vincent Price vehicle Theatre of Blood are just as indelible.

Beyond Hammer, Amicus - run from Shepperton by Milton Subotsky and best known for charming commuter-
belt updates of the old Dead of Night portmanteau format - ran into trouble with the London Transport Executive

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