Customer Reviews

Horror Movie Posters (Illustrated History of Movies Through Posters)

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Horror Movie Posters is at once a beautiful book to browse and a fascinating chronicle of advertising art through the decades. Just a cursory look reveals how the graphic art evolved, from the incredible stone-lithography of the golden age (silents to late '30s) through the more garish '50s style to the photo-based designs so common today. As a collector of movie memorabilia, I have found this entire series an invaluable resource; one needn't be a collector to enjoy these books, however. Any film aficionado will treasure this volume. Highly recommended!

Horror Movie Posters shows photographs of 306 movie posters in chronological order. All are in color, and very clear. The ones that are more detailed are larger. It's a picture book, meaning the author does analyze the posters. He lets the visual content speaks for itself.

It is very intriguing to see some posters from movies before my time. It's funny to see that the movie picture industry treated horror movie posters in a somber mood in the early days, and then moved to "silly" posters in the 50s. Now in the 90s, after having viewed some of the horror movies, the poster is the scariest thing.

If you are really into movies, I think this would be a really cool book to own.

From the first few pages of LON CHANEY SR POSTERS you wont be able to put it down.The photo of Dracula and Frankenstein are worth the price of the whole book.The Thing half sheet, Or The fly six sheet would make any one want one in there collection. Book goes all the way up to the movie Scream.You cant go wrong

For lovers of film, film history, and specifically, poster art, Bruce Hershenson's series of full-color books is the cream of the crop! And, the quality of printing and photography is superb, with razor sharp images and vibrant colors.

This review can easily apply to any of the books in the Bruce Hershenson edited series of film poster history. Hershenson rightly treats film graphics not just as pop culture artifacts but true works of art. His books are filled with a curator's eye for superior choice and reproduction, each poster in striking color and with a clarity of printing that rivals most any coffee table art book. Somewhere between advertising and illustration, film posters, like book jackets and record covers, inhabit that imaginative and atmospheric zone where one art reflects another. It's not just the history of film or the history of film design, it's a history of twentieth century Saturday afternoons and Saturday nights. How often we would go into the dark theatre armed only with the ideas and ideals of the posters outside, and then return to them afterward, perhaps with nodding affirmation or smirking disillusionment, but still a vision of what could be. This series of books should be subtitiled: THE FINE ART OF ANTICIPATION, for no matter if expectation was filled or emptied by the films behind them, their posters kept on shining.