Smells Like Old-School Posters Part 2

Continuing on from last week's body snatcher theme, what we have here is yet another flood of posters for old-school horror films that most people have completely forgotten. The criteria used for this selection are simple: the posters should be at least interesting enough to make you consider watching the films they're made for, regardless of how good or bad the film itself could be. This means that here we have both classics (The Body Snatcher, John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness) and total crap (Killer Party, Ghost Lake), ancient flicks (The Brain Eaters) and new-ish affairs (The Gravedancers), as well as a problem: when it comes to watching horror, we rarely discriminate but we suffer often. Enjoy!

"I've always thought of zombies as..."

Frankensteinia

Just go HERE immediately! A whole blog about all things Frankenstein can't be anything other than brilliant! Now peppered with an extensive collection of Frankenstein art...

Open late...

These are a couple of months old and I'm not 100% sure they are real ads but none of that matters as the concept is pure genius. "Open late"? Why, of course, you just drop by once your shift ends!

Smells Like Old-School Posters Part 1

Danse Macabre is going all old-school this month, holding no punches against the monsters and nightmare fuels of our collective pasts, just to prove there is still quite a life ahead of us. As a taste of things to come, check out the posters below: some of these movies you should know while others are pure trash, but all of the posters are splendid teasers and visions of terror in their own right! Ah, the smell of nostalgia...

True Blood Season 3 Poster 2

Another one for the masses. Hope you get it, and if you don't, look for the definition of MILF, he-he... These guys are certainly not playing down the naughtiness factor anytime soon. Well, more power to them!

True Blood Season 3: Nothing Like a Good Cup of Joe

The ad campaign for the third season of True Blood has kicked off in gloriously gruesome fashion. Poster No.1 out of 12 overall is now available for your viewing pleasure, as well as to inform you that the vampire series will be hitting the HBO screens (and the torrent world) on Sunday, June 13. 'Till then, we expect many more goodies to come our way.

A Nightmare on Elm Street New Poster

As the release date of the Nightmare on Elm Street remake approaches, it's time for a new one-sheet poster just to remind us all of the great uncertainties in life. Will it be any good? Will it be crap beyond human comprehension? Will it be scary, gross, or stupidly funny? Who knows and at the end of the day, I'm sure it's not a waking thought for any sane person what with all the serious problems we all face on daily basis. That said, I find the poster rather bland: it's almost like it's saying "Heeeere's Freddy!" and, you know, if that's all that this little film amounts to, it shouldn't deserve any attention whatsoever. The art for the original was way more inventive. Peace!

Mark Ryden!

You should know Mark Ryden's work even if you don't care at all about modern art. For one, he's the guy responsible for the cover of Michael Jackson's Dangerous, as well as for Stephen King's Desperation and The Regulators. In fact, I'll bet you've seen quite a lot of Ryden's designs over the years within various low-brow publications or re-printed as decorative art anywhere there's need for a bit of a "psychedelic" touch.

With this background, it's rather easy to dismiss Ryden as the populist "hired-hands" type, instead of the serious artist that he's been promoted as, but in this day and age does it matter at all what brand we stick on his ass? The important thing is that his art is, how shall we put it, fucked up all the way through. Intriguing and unsettling, baffling and enchanting, Ryden's world is that of Alice's Wonderland only tons more sinister and explicit in its allusions to politics, pop culture and pedophilia.

Ryden has several exhibitions behind his name including the upcoming The Gay 90's Olde Tyme Art Show, which will see the light of day this April in New York. The best of them, however, would have to be The Meat Show (1998) and Blood (2003), which depict the nameless heroines facing utter corruption with either wonder or pervasive melancholia. The pics presented here are a small selection from the Blood show; if you want to see more of this guy, head straight to his website and never look back.

Killer Kid Posters

The concept of the killer kid is immensely dangerous if mishandled. You can try to be dead serious and have something to say or you can be humorous and break taboos but you can never take it lightly. Of course, Kenny from South Park has died hundreds of times but it's a cartoon so it's easy to shrug away. Set the killings in a realistic setting and give the kid a face, and it's immediately much more difficult to film its death, especially if the kid is the villain of the piece and the hero can only survive by becoming its designated killer. Still, a bunch of films have spun entertaining yarns about children that do nasty things, and here are posters for some of them. If you decide to watch any of these, be careful not to lose sight of the fact that it's all just fiction.