B Movie\Exploitation Movie Posters.

A big love of mine are B movies. B movie are “motion picture made on a low or modest budget and intended for distribution as the less-publicized, bottom half of a double feature” or so says the mighty Wikipedia. (Always wondered why they were called B movies and now I know. Even I’m learning something from this blog). But what I think I love even more then B movies or Grindhouse films\Trailers or exploitation movies are they’re posters. I think it comes from back when I was a kid and I’d walk in to the local newsagents that had a video room in the back. VHS rental boxes were massive back then and this room was crammed with videos from floor to ceiling. I wasn’t old enough to watch most of those films but just walking around looking at all the different covers seemed cool enough. Most B movies tend to be a let down after all as I sadly found out when I was old enough to watch them. Hence why the posters and video covers were always so cool to look at. What the director couldn’t pull off in the movie with his budget and skill, he’d pay an artist to paint up how it should look even if half the time the movie doesn’t. You could say as a small kid that those days hanging out at the weekend around video stores, was the first time I really started to notice artwork.

When I’m drawing a cover to a comic I tend to try and take a little from the design of posters for B movie\Exploitation films. Comic covers and film posters are different, but not so different in many ways. In fact I’d even go as far as to say it wouldn’t surprise me if those Movie poster artist took some lessons from comic book covers.

I’ve picked out a few B movie posters that I really like and that I think really work well even if the film it based on probably didn’t.








The Phantom Of Paradise is a great cult film by Brian De Plama. Very twisted. Very cool. They tend to use photo from the film to promote the film now sadly but I think this poster from 1974 is fantastic. Probably one of the best taglines you’re ever read on a poster as well.



I never seen or even heard of this film but I’m guessing the film probably isn’t as good as it’s poster. It like something off an EC comic cover.