If you look up the word ‘lurid’ in the dictionary then there’s a good chance that you’d come face-to-face with a poster from Hammer Studios.
Swathed with primary colours (usually a good dollop of blood red), salacious tag lines (‘The chill of the tomb won’t leave your blood for hours!’) and – quite often – a multitude of ladies with cleavage you could ski down, the posters could sometimes be more memorable than the movie they were advertising.
Even the non-horror posters (it’s easy to forget that all sorts of movies came out of the Hammer studios)were eye-popping affairs, promising thrills and spills for those brave souls who ventured to their local fleapits for a dose of cinematic adventure.
The Art of Hammer by Marcus Hearn collects some of the very best Hammer posters between 1950 and 1979 and it’s a fantastic celebration of the sheer gusto with which the studio approached all its projects.
As a coffee table book for cinema/horror fans the book is splendid but as a testament to the sheer over-the-top nature and sense of humour displayed by those filmmakers, actors and artists who toiled away at one of the UK’s most iconic studios The Art of Hammer is superb.
For LWLies readers we’ve got a special gallery of some of the posters in the book the represents some of the best – and tongue in cheek – posters included in the book. Look out for one including the late, great Ingrid Pitt.
The Art of Hammer (by Marcus Hearn and published by Titan Books) is available now.
The Art Of Hammer (text) by Laurence Boyce is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
