A striking and fairly unusual design features on this 30×40 poster for the release of the 1982 horror The Beast Within, directed by Philippe Mora. The film’s screenplay was written by Tom Holland (his first produced) who would go on to write other classic horrors like Fright Night and Child’s Play. The film opens in 1965 as a newly married couple are traveling down a dark country road in Mississippi when their car gets stuck in a ditch and the man, Eli McLeary (played by Ronny Cox) heads off to find help. His wife Caroline (Bibi Besch) stays with the car but when their dog runs into a nearby wood she goes to try and retrieve it she is attacked by a strange beast, raped and left for dead.

Seventeen years later we discover that a child called Michael was born as a result of the attack and has been raised by the McLearys as their own. Having had a normal child he has started to suffer a mystery illness that the doctors cannot explain, aside from the presence of a swollen pituitary gland. The family decide to head back to the small town near where the incident happened to discover if there could be anything to explain the sickness but it soon becomes clear that Michael is being taken over by a beastly force that he can’t control and that several people in the town are at grave risk. Unfortunately budgetary restraints and producer whims meant that Holland’s screenplay was not shot in its entirety, meaning that the storyline is pretty garbled in places and the reasons for both Michael’s transformation (reincarnation) and why he’s only killing certain people are not exactly clear.

Despite missing out on box-office success on its cinema release it has since garnered something of a cult following, particularly in the VHS era, and that’s likely to do with the effectively creepy atmosphere, the fact that it doesn’t hold back on the gore, and the relatively high quality of the special creature effects. Of note is the final transformation scene for Michael, which is particularly well done and gruesome, aside from a couple of cringeworthy moments where the team clearly got a bit carried away (balloon head!). This poster and the film’s trailer made a big deal of how shocking and terrifying the film was and the trailer even mentions the last 30 minutes as being particularly horrible. I’m unsure who designed this poster so if you have any ideas please get in touch.

Cult filmmaker Don Coscarelli wrote and directed this 1982 sword and sorcery flick starring Marc Singer as the titular prince and the gorgeous Tanya Roberts as Kiri, his love interest. Dar (Singer) is the son of King Zed (Rod Loomis) who, in a bizarre sequence, is stolen from his mother’s womb and placed inside the belly of an ox on the orders of evil priest Maax (Rip Torn). When born the prince is gifted with the ability to telepathically communicate with animals and after being adopted and raised by a lowly villager, Dar is trained to be a skilled swordsman. One day the village is attacked and burned by the rampaging Jun horde who are under the control of Maax, and the warrior sets on a quest for revenge with his animal friends, including an eagle, two ferrets(!) and a black panther.

According to the IMDb trivia page for the film, the black panther was actually a tiger with its fur dyed and whenever the animal took a drink the dye would wash off around its mouth, which is noticeable in several scenes. Also, rather brilliantly, the eagle often refused to fly on cue so in order to shoot footage of it in the air it was dropped from a trapdoor in a hot air balloon.

The artwork on this US one sheet is by an American artist called C. Winston Taylor, about whom very little can be found online. The Lost Video Archive blog has a post on the artist that features images of some of his other posters and video covers. In the 1990s the artist was hired to paint the covers for a Quantum Leap comic book series and a gallery of those images can be viewed on this site, which also features three images of the artist himself. Comicbookdb.com features a small profile of Taylor with the following mini-biography:

C. Winston Taylor always knew from a young age that he would communicate through his drawings. Fighting in the jungles of Vietnam, where he earned two Bronze Stars, helped solidify this vision. After graduating with honors from the Art Center College of Design, in Los Angeles, he quickly became a well-respected illustrator. His work has received numerous awards and he served as the president of The Society of Illustrators of Los Angeles. 

The other posters I’ve collected with artwork by him can be seen by clicking here.