Hello!

Once again Michael McQuarrie comes up with a winner …the very first issue, fully readable, of Eric Losfeld’s Parisian publication Midi-Minuit Fantastique, from May-June of 1962.

Fully-readable comes with the caveat to brush up on one’s French. I remember when James Ursini loaned me a stack of these many a year ago, which saw me asking for quick translations from the missus. After a while you discover that film writing about horror films tends to reuse the same 300 words. Once you have a few of those down in a foreign language, you can at least get an idea what the writers are talking about.

It’s 1962 and the French critics are nuts about Hammer Films and Terence Fisher. The only Mario Bava being discussed is  Hercules in the Haunted World and they love him, too. The pages are packed with big B&W photos, plus credits and synopses. Modern readers no longer need those, as the web has full credits, and often encodings of the films themselves. Back in the day, specialty film magazines like this could be a valued resource. A plus, we learn when the titles played in Paris. I can’t imagine what attending “Le cauchemar de Dracula” would be like, in a Paris theater decked out like the one above.

Meanwhile, correspondent “E.” sends along a link that some readers might enjoy.

It’s to a web page dedicated to the artist Tom Chantrell, who is responsible for many classic movie poster artworks from 1938 forward.

The website is Hammer Horror Posters; follow the link and you’ll see a home page and a blog page by the site’s author ‘Dave.’ The blog is insubstantial and hasn’t been updated in years, but it has an eye-catching photo of Mr. Dave posing with 8 of Hammer’s brightest actresses, a pretty glorious portrait.

The Tom Chantrell Poster Artist page has a good interview with the artist and some more photos of Chantrell posing with his work, by Simon Greetham. The artist passed away in 2001, which makes us think that the website was originally put together in the 1990s. His  Wiki page names many of his poster commissions. This must be Old News to many, as Chantrell designed posters for the first Star Wars movie.

Other galleries give us big selections of Amicus posters, and two other categories. The Hammer posters link didn’t work for me. Don’t get your hopes up, as some of the posters are watermarked.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson