It’s hard to believe that it’s celebrating its 20th anniversary this year but The Nightmare Before Christmas has lost none of its magic and is a film that I could happily re-watch year after year. The combination of Tim Burton‘s storytelling and character design, with Henry Selick‘s direction and Danny Elfman‘s brilliant songs (and voice) make for one of the best animated films ever made. The story has its origins from the time when Tim Burton was working at Disney as an animator and had just completed the short film Vincent in 1982. After writing a short poem with the same title, Burton played around the idea of adapting it as a television special and a book, but eventually Disney agreed to help him produce it as a short film. 

After meeting Selick, a fellow animator at the same studio, he came close to realising his original vision before development stalled, apparently after Disney felt the project was ‘too weird’. Several years passed which saw Burton strike box-office gold with Beetlejuice and Batman, before he discovered that Disney still owned the rights to the film. He and Selick committed to the idea of developing the project into a feature length animation and because of commitments to directing Batman Returns (1992) it was agreed that the latter would direct.

Utilising 20 sound stages and 120 animators, Selick set about bringing to life the story of Jack Skellington, the Pumpkin King, and organiser of Halloweentown’s annual party. Fed up of the same routine year after year, Jack is walking in the forest and discovers a series of doors leading to other holiday-based worlds. Upon entering the Christmas door Jack is enchanted by everything he sees and vows to take on the role of Santa for the next Christmas day. Each member of Halloweentown is given a task to prepare for the big event, but their penchant for all things ghoulish isn’t compatible with the jollity of Christmas and Jack’s dream is in danger of unravelling completely.

The quality of the stop-motion animation and character design is first-rate and Elfman’s songs are unforgettably great. The Nightmare Before Christmas has a legion of fans and a 3D re-release occurred in 2006 which further increased its popularity, and a seemingly endless stream of merchandise has been released over the past two decades.

This is the illustration style British quad that was printed for the original release of the film and there is also another quad which I’ve dubbed the photo style (photo in the sense that it’s a posed still from the film) and that can be seen here. I’m unsure who’s responsible for this artwork so please get in touch if you have an idea.

It’s hard to believe that it’s celebrating its 20th anniversary this year but The Nightmare Before Christmas has lost none of its magic and is a film that I could happily re-watch year after year. The combination of Tim Burton‘s storytelling and character design, with Henry Selick‘s direction and Danny Elfman‘s brilliant songs (and voice) make for one of the best animated films ever made. The story has its origins from the time when Tim Burton was working at Disney as an animator and had just completed the short film Vincent in 1982. After writing a short poem with the same title, Burton played around the idea of adapting it as a television special and a book, but eventually Disney agreed to help him produce it as a short film. 

After meeting Selick, a fellow animator at the same studio, he came close to realising his original vision before development stalled, apparently after Disney felt the project was ‘too weird’. Several years passed which saw Burton strike box-office gold with Beetlejuice and Batman, before he discovered that Disney still owned the rights to the film. He and Selick committed to the idea of developing the project into a feature length animation and because of commitments to directing Batman Returns (1992) it was agreed that the latter would direct.

Utilising 20 sound stages and 120 animators, Selick set about bringing to life the story of Jack Skellington, the Pumpkin King, and organiser of Halloweentown’s annual party. Fed up of the same routine year after year, Jack is walking in the forest and discovers a series of doors leading to other holiday-based worlds. Upon entering the Christmas door Jack is enchanted by everything he sees and vows to take on the role of Santa for the next Christmas day. Each member of Halloweentown is given a task to prepare for the big event, but their penchant for all things ghoulish isn’t compatible with the jollity of Christmas and Jack’s dream is in danger of unravelling completely.

The quality of the stop-motion animation and character design is first-rate and Elfman’s songs are unforgettably great. The Nightmare Before Christmas has a legion of fans and a 3D re-release occurred in 2006 which further increased its popularity, and a seemingly endless stream of merchandise has been released over the past two decades.

This is the photo style (photo in the sense that it’s a posed still from the film) British quad that was printed for the original release of the film and there is also another quad which features an illustration and that can be seen here. This design is effectively the landscape format version of the US one sheet.

Hobo With a Shotgun is a Canadian exploitation action film which started out as a fake trailer that was the winning entry in a competition held as part of the promotion of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s Grindhouse. Prior to the 2007 South By Southwest festival (held annually in Austin, Texas) Rodriguez challenged budding filmmakers to create a trailer that celebrated exploitation and horror films, which would then be shown as part of a panel on Grindhouse cinema.

This CinemaBlend article describes the event and confirms that the trailer by Nova Scotians Jason Eisener, John Davies, and Rob Cotterill was the winner. When Grindhouse was shown in cinemas in the US there were several fake trailers shown around the two main features, shot by the likes of Edgar Wright and Rob Zombie, and the Hobo With a Shotgun was shown alongside them in several Canadian cinemas. In 2010 Rodriguez turned his fake Grindhouse trailer for a film called Machete, starring long-time collaborator Danny Trejo, into a feature-length release and Jason Eisener then followed suit with a full-length version of Hobo in 2011.

The film stars Rutger Hauer as the titular homeless man who arrives in the fictional Hope Town only to discover it is now known as Scum Town and is ruled over by crime boss Drake and his psychotic sons Ivan and Slick. The family have a stranglehold over the town and the hobo witnesses robberies, brutal violence and prostitution as he wanders the streets. Although he initially dreams of buying a lawnmower from a pawnshop to earn money through landscaping, an encounter with Slick and Ivan steels his resolve to do something about the injustice he’s seen. The same pawnshop has shotguns for sale and so the hobo sets out to clean up the streets, delivering justice one shell at a time!

The film absolutely nails the grindhouse aesthetic and has clearly been made by someone with genuine reverence for the films that defined the genre. The production design is top notch throughout with Dartmouth and Halifax in Nova Scotia turned convincingly into the crime-ridden Scum Town. It’s also filled with excellent performances from actors who are clearly enjoying delivering the outlandish lines that John Davies’ script contains, but Hauer steals the show with his enjoyment of playing the vengeful hobo clear to see. The soundtrack is also notably excellent and perfectly suits the action on screen.

This poster was designed and illustrated by Tom Hodge AKA The Dude Designs, a Brit who has worked for over 12 years creating advertising materials for films and games, and is a big proponent of continuing the use of painted artwork over computer-generated montages. The about page on his official site details several of the companies he’s provided illustrations for, which includes Mondo, Arrow Video and Death Waltz Records (he created their logo, amongst other projects). The site also includes galleries of his work, which includes this great cover for the Shout Factory release of John Carpenter’s They Live. It’s my belief that this poster for Hobo was the first one of his to be printed and used around the world to advertise the film.

Despite the phenomenal ratings success that David Lynch and Mark Frost‘s Twin Peaks TV series had enjoyed during its first season, the viewing figures dropped sharply in the middle of the second and the show was put on hiatus by ABC. After a letter-writing campaign by fans, dubbed COOP (Citizens Opposed to the Offing of Peaks), the studio relented and agreed to show the remaining six episodes. The biggest problem the show faced was that halfway through the second series the killer of Laura Palmer had been revealed, which had been the main storyline focus up until that point, and the following episodes failed to hold viewer interest as much.

When ABC revealed they were not planning to make a third series the show’s cancellation was confirmed. Only a month after this happened, Lynch announced that he was planning to make a Twin Peaks film in conjunction with French company CIBY-2000, which ended up being both a prequel and an epilogue to the original show. Working without Mark Frost, Lynch was able to assemble most of the original cast, with the exception of Lara Flynn Boyle, Sherilyn Fenn and Richard Beymer. Kyle MacLachlan had been reluctant to return as FBI Agent Dale Cooper and is only featured briefly in the film, which lead Lynch and his co-screenwriter to change the focus of the film, with another murder case and the life of Laura Palmer being key facets of the plot.

Chris Isaak plays FBI Agent Chester Desmond who, along with his new partner Sam Stanley (Kiefer Sutherland), are sent to investigate the murder of Teresa Banks in the town of Deer Meadow. After finding an important clue, Desmond mysteriously disappears and the film then cuts to one year later in the town of Twin Peaks, picking up the story of homecoming queen Laura Palmer whose eventual murder has a direct link to that of Teresa Banks.

Despite the cult following of the TV series, the film was both a critical and commercial flop and was greeted with boos and jeers at the Cannes Film Festival, with Quentin Tarantino confessing “After I saw Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me at Cannes, David Lynch had disappeared so far up his own ass that I have no desire to see another David Lynch movie until I hear something different. And you know, I loved him. I loved him.” It also saw poor box-office takings in the USA after the ratings drop of the second series and the unforgiving plot for people unfamiliar with the Twin Peaks universe.

However, the film was a commercial success in Japan where David Lynch and Twin Peaks are held in very high regard, and where this B2 poster hails from. It features head-shots of the principal cast members, including David Bowie who actually only appears in a short cameo role as an FBI agent.

The original trailer is on YouTube.

This British quad for Terry Gilliam‘s time-travelling fantasy features artwork by the director himself. His signature can be seen to the bottom right of the castle and a more scribbly ‘Gilliam’ is subtly hidden in the background hills (see photo 3). Time Bandits is one of the director’s best, in my opinion, and features typically brilliant imagery combined with a great cast, including a few surprising cameos.

The film follows 11-year-old Kevin (Craig Warnock) and his adventures with a troupe of time-travelling dwarves who are on the run from their master, the Supreme Being. As the gang use a special map to hop through holes in the universe and into different time periods they soon realise that their journey is being controlled by a sinister force. It’s not long before they are forced to confront Evil and save themselves from certain death. The ending of the film, which I won’t spoil, is brilliantly bonkers.

According to IMDb, in 1996 Terry Gilliam and [screenwriter and actor] Charles McKeown collaborated on a script for Time Bandits 2, bringing back most of the original cast, with the exceptions of David Rappaport and Tiny Ross who had passed away a few years before, and owing to Jack Purvis being paralysed from a car accident, his character was written to be in a similar state. But following the death of Purvis, the project was shelved indefinitely.

The excellent, unusual trailer is on YouTube.

This is the US one sheet poster for David Lynch’s 1990 twisted road trip Wild at Heart. Based on Barry Gifford’s 1989 novel of the same name, the film is arguably the most conventional film that Lynch has ever made, but it’s no less weird and wonderful than the rest of his output. Nicolas Cage turns in one of his career best performances as Sailor Ripley, a young man sent to jail for killing a knife-wielding attacker in North Carolina.

Upon his release, he is met by his girlfriend Lula Fortune (Laura Dern) at the prison gates and the pair decide to run away to California to escape her domineering mother Marietta (a memorable performance by Diane Ladd). Marietta is a twisted bully and totally disapproves of Sailor and Lula’s relationship. It’s revealed that she sent the knife-wielding killer after him to begin with and when they disappear she hires both a private detective and a dangerous mobster to track them down.

The lovers end up in Texas where they meet an old friend called Perdita Durango (Isabella Rossellini) who they hope will be able to help them, but also encounter the psychotic gangster Bobby Peru (a terrifying Willem Dafoe) who leads Sailor astray with terrible consequences. The film is full of Lynch’s trademark surreal sequences and shocking moments of violence, including one involving a shotgun that is hard to forget. Apparently the film tested badly upon completion and Lynch recalls that over 100 people walked out during one screening. It received a pretty mixed critical reception but it did win the coveted Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and was a moderate financial success in the US and internationally.

Artwork by Brian Bysouth on this quad for the UK release of Saigon, which is also known as Off Limits in the USA. As the international title suggests, the film is set during the Vietnam war and sees two military policemen played by Willem Dafoe and Gregory Hines investigating the deaths of several prostitutes in Saigon’s red light district. It soon becomes clear that the prime suspect is a high-ranking US Army officer and that the two cops are in for more than they bargained for.

Despite a strong supporting cast, including Scott Glenn, Keith David and Fred Ward, the film appears to have failed to make much of a box-office or critical impact. It certainly saw none of the success of Dafoe’s previous Vietnam-based film, the oscar-winning Platoon. The film features some brilliantly odd character names, such as Buck McGriff (Dafoe) and Albaby Perkins (Hines).

Bysouth’s artwork has similar star portraits to the ones seen on the US one sheet, but the street scene and other characters are unique to the quad. In 2012 I met and interviewed the artist and the resulting article can be read here.

To see the other posters I’ve collected by the artist click here.

The trailer for the film can be seen on YouTube.

Director John Landis‘ horror classic An American Werewolf in London was, unusually for the time, released simultaneously in North American and British cinemas. The film was shot in the UK with a largely local cast and crew thanks to the Eady Levy, which provided funding for British productions based on taxed box-office receipts. The levy attracted a number of foreign producers and directors including Stanley Kubrick, Sidney Lumet and John Huston. The levy lasted for almost thirty years before being wound-up in 1985.

It was this incentive that saw Landis and his producing partners (including frequent collaborator George Folsey Jr.) move over here for the duration of filming, and although the two lead actors (David Naughton and Griffin Dunne) are American, the majority of the rest of the cast are British, including the gorgeous Jenny Agutter. The film makes excellent use of several London locations, with a memorable sequence on the Underground, plus the climactic scenes shot in and around Piccadilly Circus. There is an excellent article on the Guardian website that was written by Landis in 2009 in which he recalls his memories of shooting the film.

Although AWIL was released on the same day in each country, the American and British posters couldn’t be any more different. The USA one sheet features an enigmatic shot of the two lead actors glancing over their shoulders with a look of concern whist a full moon shines above them. There’s not even a glimpse of the titular creature, whereas this UK quad has no qualms about featuring a large shot taken from the famous transformation scene. It also features the bizarre inclusion of a black and white image of a nude Naughton confronting an old lady after waking up in London Zoo.

Fans of the film would be wise to pick up the 2009 blu-ray release as it features a must-watch documentary on the film called Beware the Moon: Remembering ‘An American Werewolf in London’ that was conceived and filmed by life-long AWIL devotee Paul Davis. It features the majority of the surviving cast and crew and has clearly been put together by someone who cares about the film deeply.

This Japanese B2 for Terry Gilliam‘s time-travelling fantasy Time Bandits features unique artwork exclusive to the poster. The 1981 film is one of the director’s best, in my opinion, and features typically brilliant imagery combined with a great cast, including a few surprising cameos.

The film follows 11-year-old Kevin (Craig Warnock) and his adventures with a troupe of time-travelling dwarves who are on the run from their master, the Supreme Being. As the gang use a special map to hop through holes in the universe and into different time periods they soon realise that their journey is being controlled by a sinister force. It’s not long before they are forced to confront Evil and save themselves from certain death. The ending of the film, which I won’t spoil, is brilliantly bonkers.

According to IMDb, in 1996 Terry Gilliam and [screenwriter and actor] Charles McKeown collaborated on a script for Time Bandits 2, bringing back most of the original cast, with the exceptions of David Rappaport and Tiny Ross who had passed away a few years before, and owing to Jack Purvis being paralysed from a car accident, his character was written to be in a similar state. But following the death of Purvis, the project was shelved indefinitely.

I’m unsure who is responsible for the artwork on this poster and there are no signatures or any other identifying marks. If you have any ideas please get in touch.

The excellent, unusual trailer is on YouTube.

Another of Disney’s forays into live-action filmmaking (this was actually the studio’s second PG-rated film after 1979’s The Black Hole), The Watcher in the Woods is an eerie mystery thriller that absolutely terrified me when I first watched it as a child in the 1980s. An Anglo-American co-production, the film was helmed by John Hough and English director who had proved his horror chops with the adults-only The Legend of Hell House (1973) and was chosen by the American producer Ron Miller to work on this film. Legendary Hollywood actress Bette Davis was lined up to star and the year of production coincided with her 50th in the business.

The story sees an Anglo-American family move to a manor house surrounded by thick woodland that is owned by Mrs. Aylwood (Davis). One of the daughters, Jan (played by Lynn-Holly Johnson, the real-life figure-skater who would appear in For Your Eyes Only soon after), is told she bears a striking resemblance to Mrs Aylwood’s daughter Karen who went missing 30 years earlier. Jan begins to see strange apparitions in the forest and suffers a series of unexplainable phenomena. After discovering an abandoned church in the middle of the woods, Jan finds that there’s more to Karen’s disappearance than she’s been told and it’s not long before the secret behind the ‘Watcher’ is revealed.

This American one sheet bears the signature of an artist called David J. Negrón whose official website is here and describes him as an American impressionist. Negrón was born in Texas in 1935 and later graduated from the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles, which allowed him to get a job at Twentieth Century Fox as a storyboard artist and production illustrator. He went on to work on films such as Hello Dolly, Raider’s Of The Lost Ark, Dog Day Afternoon, Back to The Future III, Jurassic Park and others. His website features a gallery of examples of his movie work and includes a great image of King Kong painted for Dino De Laurentiis’ 1976 version.

The original trailer is on YouTube.

A suitably bizarre design features on this Czech poster for David Lynch’s 1990 twisted road trip Wild at Heart. Based on Barry Gifford’s 1989 novel of the same name, the film is arguably the most conventional film that Lynch has ever made, but it’s no less weird and wonderful than the rest of his output. Nicolas Cage turns in one of his career best performances as Sailor Ripley, a young man sent to jail for killing a knife-wielding attacker in North Carolina.

Upon his release, he is met by his girlfriend Lula Fortune (Laura Dern) at the prison gates and the pair decide to run away to California to escape her domineering mother Marietta (a memorable performance by Diane Ladd). Marietta is a twisted bully and totally disapproves of Sailor and Lula’s relationship. It’s revealed that she sent the knife-wielding killer after him to begin with and when they disappear she hires both a private detective and a dangerous mobster to track them down.

The lovers end up in Texas where they meet an old friend called Perdita Durango (Isabella Rossellini) who they hope will be able to help them, but also encounter the psychotic gangster Bobby Peru (a terrifying Willem Dafoe) who leads Sailor astray with terrible consequences. The film is full of Lynch’s trademark surreal sequences and shocking moments of violence, including one involving a shotgun that is hard to forget. Apparently the film tested badly upon completion and Lynch recalls that over 100 people walked out during one screening. It received a pretty mixed critical reception but it did win the coveted Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and was a moderate financial success in the US and internationally.

This Czech poster was designed by Jan Weber about whom I’ve been able to discover very little, other than that he was active from the 1970s to the 1990s and mainly specialised in posters for Hollywood films being released in Czechoslovakia. The site Terry Posters has a gallery of many of his posters.

Despite the phenomenal ratings success that David Lynch and Mark Frost‘s Twin Peaks TV series had enjoyed during its first season, the viewing figures dropped sharply in the middle of the second and the show was put on hiatus by ABC. After a letter-writing campaign by fans, dubbed COOP (Citizens Opposed to the Offing of Peaks), the studio relented and agreed to show the remaining six episodes. The biggest problem the show faced was that halfway through the second series the killer of Laura Palmer had been revealed, which had been the main storyline focus up until that point, and the following episodes failed to hold viewer interest as much.

When ABC revealed they were not planning to make a third series the show’s cancellation was confirmed. Only a month after this happened, Lynch announced that he was planning to make a Twin Peaks film in conjunction with French company CIBY-2000, which ended up being both a prequel and an epilogue to the original show. Working without Mark Frost, Lynch was able to assemble most of the original cast, with the exception of Lara Flynn Boyle, Sherilyn Fenn and Richard Beymer. Kyle MacLachlan had been reluctant to return as FBI Agent Dale Cooper and is only featured briefly in the film, which lead Lynch and his co-screenwriter to change the focus of the film, with another murder case and the life of Laura Palmer being key facets of the plot.

In Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, Chris Isaak plays FBI Agent Chester Desmond who, along with his new partner Sam Stanley (Kiefer Sutherland), are sent to investigate the murder of Teresa Banks in the town of Deer Meadow. After finding an important clue, Desmond mysteriously disappears and the film then cuts to one year later in the town of Twin Peaks, picking up the story of homecoming queen Laura Palmer whose eventual murder has a direct link to that of Teresa Banks.

Despite the cult following of the TV series, the film was both a critical and commercial flop and was greeted with boos and jeers at the Cannes Film Festival, with Quentin Tarantino confessing “After I saw Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me at Cannes, David Lynch had disappeared so far up his own ass that I have no desire to see another David Lynch movie until I hear something different. And you know, I loved him. I loved him.” It also saw poor box-office takings in the USA after the ratings drop of the second series and the unforgiving plot for people unfamiliar with the Twin Peaks universe.

This US one sheet features a portrait of Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) and the split necklace. Notably this one sheet is double-sided and will have been one of the first to be printed in this way.

The original trailer is on YouTube.

British designer and illustrator Vic Fair is responsible for the arresting poster for this 1975 horror film Legend of the Werewolf directed by Freddie Francis and produced by Tyburn Film Productions. Francis is probably best known as an Academy-Award winning cinematographer (Sons and Lovers, Glory), and he worked with David Lynch on The Elephant Man, Dune and The Straight Story. He’s also responsible for directing a slew of films for the British production companies Hammer, Amicus and Tigon, including Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors and Dracula has Risen from the Grave.

Tyburn was apparently set up by Freddie Francis’ son, Kevin, and was only active for a short period, producing three horror films in 1975, including this one, The Ghoul and Persecution. I wasn’t able to discover much more information about the company so please get in touch if you know anything of note.

The story is set in 19th century France and focuses on Etoile (David Rintoul) who is raised by wolves and is later found and adopted by a sideshow troupe traveling through the forrest. He eventually escapes to Paris and becomes infatuated with a prostitute (Lynn Dalby), but when her clients begin to be brutally murdered a police surgeon (Cushing) begins to suspect all is not quite right with Etoile.

Sim Branaghan, author of the excellent book British Film Posters: An Illustrated History is a fan of the film and sent this through to me shortly after I added the poster to the site:

I actually know a large amount about this film – and Tyburn – for the simple reason that a book was published by the BFI back in 1976, which exhaustively documented its production. The film happens to be one of my personal favourites and I think it is witty, thoughtful, and finally genuinely moving (if only in a small way). Tony Hinds’ script is classic dark-fairy-tale, the acting fine, Francis’s direction skilfully-unobtrusive and Harry Robinson’s score absolutely terrific. Cushing gives his usual model, controlled performance (rather more light-hearted than usual), Ron Moody is excellent, and David Rintoul fresh and sympathetic as the werewolf.

The supporting cast is a bit mixed, but nobody actively embarrasses themselves. Yes, the film is painfully low-budget and sometimes looks pretty threadbare, but it has HEART. Historically, it’s hugely significant as the last Costume Gothic produced in the UK (almost exactly eighteen years after the first, Curse of Frankenstein, back in autumn 1956). Hinds and Cushing worked on both of course, and the sense of fin-de-siecle here is palpable, and very poignant to a true fan of the genre.

Obviously all criticism is subjective, and you might well find plenty of other horror fans who’ll cheerfully tell you Legend is a pile of shite.  But they’d be wrong. 

The pictures of the poster don’t do the striking neon colours justice and I believe it was done with a type of screen-printing as they are particularly solid and bright in person.

Here’s a clip from the film featuring a red-tinted werewolf-vision attack.