Horror movies are scary, exciting, sometimes even salacious. Which means that the movie posters advertising horror flicks are often very creative with a focus on frightening and enticing audiences to theaters. Scoop, recently chatted with Bruce Hershenson, founder of the movie poster auction house eMoviePoster.

He talked about why horror posters can outsell contemporaries and the factors that make attractive horror posters. He pointed out notable examples, ways that posters can differ from the film plots, and modern reimagined posters by companies like Mondo. eMoviePoster is gearing up for their 18th Annual Halloween Auction, making now a great time to learn more about collecting horror posters.

Scoop: Horror posters, in general, tend to sell for more than their average contemporaries. Why is that?
Bruce Hershenson (BH): Okay, there are two main reasons. One is that people are most drawn to things that affect them strongly and horror movies tend to have a real impact on you, far and away more than almost any other kind of movie. Especially if it’s scary and especially if you saw it when you were fairly young, so years later you realize that.

But the other reason, which is equally as important, is that actors age. Marilyn Monroe was incredibly popular, Jean Harlow was incredibly popular before, in the 1930s. As the years go by, the number of people who remember Jean Harlow firsthand start to diminish because they get old and pass away. Then the same thing happens for Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn, so it’s always the newer person who is remembered. People remember John Wayne firsthand, but then later on it’s Clint Eastwood and later on it’s someone else. But with horror movies, the monsters never age. There are new actors who play Frankenstein but there’s always a new Frankenstein and there’s always a new Dracula.

Scoop: In your opinion, what factors make a good horror movie poster?
BH: Well, it’s no different than any other movie. It’s a combination of how good the movie is, combined with how good the art is on the poster and then combined with the rarity of it and the condition of it. If something has all four of those factors going for it, it’s going to sell for a lot of money. If it only has a couple of those factors it’s not going to sell for as much. And, the people who make horror posters tend to make better posters than they do for average movies because a regular movie can often sell just on a picture of the star, just a regular photo. But, you would never do that for a horror movie. You have to have something from the movie, so they tend to be better posters for that reason.

Scoop: So, it’s a matter of trying to appeal more for the marketing if they don’t have a marquee star?
BH: Well, even if it is a star they’re probably in makeup in the movie, so you wouldn’t show just a picture of Robert De Niro. But for a Tom Cruise movie you can just literally use a headshot of Tom Cruise and that will draw people in. It’s sort of not really possible, they almost have to have a dramatic eye-catching poster.

Scoop: Does the level of gore on the poster affect the price? If so, is that negatively or positively?
BH: You rarely see posters that are really gory. It’s just something that’s almost never done, except in really low budget movies. That’s usually not really an issue. There are, obviously, some people that would be drawn to that and others who would be repelled by it. But, I’d say that probably balances out.

Scoop: For horror fans who are new to poster collecting, what are some key posters that you’d suggest collecting?
BH: I would absolutely look at the best movies of the ’70s on. Most older collectors, their classic horror movies are Frankenstein and Dracula and all the movies of those periods, like the 1930s-1940s, and then slightly younger collectors, it’s the ones from the 1950s when it’s like the horror/sci-fi but there’s still a lot of horror characters that started in the ’50s, like Creature from the Black Lagoon. For today’s collectors, it really seems like their classics are Nightmare on Elm Street or Halloween and those kind of movies, the posters have gotten more expensive in the last few years, but they’re still within the price range of any collector and that might not be the case in 10-20 years from now.

Scoop: In your opinion, what are the best U.S. horror posters based on the artwork?
BH: I’d say probably the best ones are the ones that sell for the most, which are the 1930s Universal horror posters because they hired really great artists who often did a full painting for the poster. Then once you get into the 1940s a lot of them shift into photographic and then there’s some really nice ones from the 1950s that have really nice art. For me, personally, I prefer an artwork poster vastly over any kind of photographic poster.

If you want specifics, it’d be like The Mummy one-sheet from 1932 or Attack of the 50 Foot Woman or Invasion of the Saucer Men. The last two I mentioned, they’re not even good movies. That’s the one difference with horror posters over any other genre is that the movies themselves don’t have to be great, if the posters are great. Whereas with others, that’s really not so true. You pretty much need a good movie first if you want a good poster from that.

Scoop: Across horror some posters are really great even if the movies aren’t. Particularly some of the sci-fi stuff from the ’50s with the ostentatious graphics and bright colors.
BH: One of the best cases of that is The Wasp Woman. In the movie it’s a woman wearing wasp-head makeup and, you know, it doesn’t look very realistic and it’s obviously a woman with just a wasp-head on. But in the poster it’s a gigantic real wasp with a woman’s head, so they completely reversed it. It makes for a great poster, but it’s like the ultimate deceptive advertising.

Scoop: How about international examples? Are there some that pop out to you as really great ones?
BH: Not so much. I don’t know that horror movies were as popular in other countries going far back. Either they weren’t as popular or the posters didn’t survive because you don’t see many foreign posters for movies from the ’50s and older. Once you get more modern you see them. The Italian posters, in particular, usually have the nicest graphics, they really had great artists working for them. But most of those that exist are from the late 1950s and later.

Scoop: You mentioned the great artwork on vintage posters from the ’30s and that they actually hired artists. Those older posters have several styles for the one-sheets and sometimes for the three-sheets, inserts, and so on. If more modern posters tried to capitalize on that strategy, do you think they’d sell better?
BH: I think surely they would. But the thing you have to remember is that the main reason they spent so much money on the posters then and why they would hire either one person to draw ten different posters or ten people to draw ten posters all for one movie is because you’re going back before TV. So the main way to advertise a movie was the posters themselves. A person would go to a theater and see those posters on display or they’d see them on billboards driving down the road. That’s how they knew which movie they were going to see. The moment TV came in, that became the primary way people learned about movies. So the posters were real secondary and that’s why they started cutting back drastically. Ironically, they also cut back because movies were hurt by television itself. It cut down on the people who went to movies. People who used to go to a movie every night started staying home and watching TV. The box office revenue went down and they said, “Well, what can we do to save money?” and one way was to spend way less money on posters.

Scoop: It’s unfortunate because there are so many great posters from those early decades. It’s a shame the newer ones aren’t better.
BH: Right, and where people really see it is when they have floating heads. Sometimes it’s something you or I could make in five minutes with photoshop and you think, “Really? Is that all they’re willing to spend on that? Couldn’t they at least hire someone to come up with an attractive looking design as opposed to just using headshots of the stars?”

Scoop: That leads into a question I wanted to ask. In the late ’90s, horror movies started casting mostly well known actors and using the floating head posters. Unfortunately, that means not a lot of them have great art. Do they still drum up interest with collectors?
BH: What has changed is that whenever anyone does take the time and effort to make a really great poster, it really stands out and it becomes very desirable and sells for more. The regular posters don’t sell for much, even for fairly good movies because they put so little effort into it. But the few where they do put effort in, they tend to do real well and are popular with collectors.

Scoop: Are there any horror posters that you think go too far with the gore/violence portrayed on them?
BH: There were some, I think they were Italian movies, that involved cannibalism. I’ve seen posters like that where they show either people being eaten or severed heads. That to me is going way too far.

Scoop: Early horror posters had beautiful artwork, but unfortunately can be really expensive. What suggestions would you give to someone who’d like to purchase some movie art from that iconic period in movie history on a smaller budget?
BH: I’d say the number one area would be the 1950s horror movies. They made so many horror movies in that time – there are a couple hundred. Some of them, the movies aren’t that great and the posters are nice but not unbelievable. Some of them are very affordable, they can be $50 or $100. That’s about the best you can possibly hope for and you can have a nice, enjoyable poster. I don’t think that situation is going to exist for much longer because those kinds of posters are getting harder to find. There were never all that many of them out there and now they’re all going into collections. At that point, the prices start to rise because they aren’t that easily attainable. So that’s one area I’d look at.

And like I said, some of those ’70s posters. They’re nice posters but there are a lot more of them out there because they were made much more recently, those would be worth looking at. Except for the very best titles, most of those are $50 or $100 even for the really nice ones. That would be something to consider.

Then there are tons of posters that can be bought for $5 or $10 as long as you stick to mostly the 1970s on.

Scoop: As a genre, horror movies tend to produce a lot of sequels, some with as many as ten installments, do you find that collectors try to collect posters from a single series?
BH: Not so much. It’s really not like comic books in that way where someone wants every issue of Superman or Batman, it’s not like that. You very rarely see people who collect in that fashion where they want all the Frankenstein posters or all of the Boris Karloff. They mostly pick and choose the specific ones they want.

Scoop: Would you say that horror poster collectors are more attracted to artwork over the title?
BH: I think it’s probably pretty evenly split. There’s like one category of people who primarily collect on the movie itself and the other who primarily collect on the art. The people who collect on the art, probably solely by posters and mostly one-sheets. The people who collect on the movie, a lot of them will collect lobby cards or stills because they are more photographic and not really artwork based.

Scoop: What are some surprising prices that horror posters have sold for at eMoviePoster?
BH: If you notice in comic books and baseball cards that the price is so closely tied to the condition. Something that’s in really nice condition in a comic book might sell for 50 or 100 times what the same one would sell for in lesser condition. But in movie posters that’s really not been the case. People pay twice as much for something in great condition, that’s usually a rarity. One of the most enjoyed horror movie posters is Attack of the 50 Foot Woman because it’s just wildly campy and ridiculous. It’s a hard poster to find in nice condition and unrestored, because almost all of them have been linen-backed. I had one in 2013 that was in really nice, unrestored condition. It normally sells for $8,000 to $10,000 and that sold for $19,000. There was a clear case of somebody paying substantially more – not only because they knew it was probably one of the nicer ones but it could literally be maybe the nicest out there and it’s also one of the few unrestored ones. That’s another issue where in comic books you’ll find a lot of restored examples but you’ll also find an awful lot of unrestored ones. Not so much on expensive movie posters. The expensive ones tend to all end up linen-backed, so that means finding an un-linen-backed one that hasn’t been restored is really, really getting harder and harder on every title.

Scoop: There’ve been companies like Mondo that have been doing reimaginings and reworking movie posters. What are your thoughts on that – are they hurting the market for originals or inspiring more collecting? Is it a nice way to get posters for movies that might’ve just done the floating heads posters before?
BH: Yes, that last sentence, absolutely. I totally am a fan of them, I really like them. I think it’s a great thing for the hobby in every way. The only thing I fear for the people behind them, is what tends to happen with those kind of collectibles is that they start putting out too many and they increase the number of each and they overwhelm the market. Then there tends to be a Beanie Baby kind of crash where they’re suddenly hard to sell. Especially if the prices rise too high where investors start buying them and the people who love them and were buying every single one they stop buying. That can really cause something like that to crash. I haven’t seen much of a sign of that. It seems like the people behind them are trying to be intelligent and not do too many and not have too many in each edition. If they keep going that route, I think they’ll do fantastically.

I think they’re a great collectible for the future – the ones that are really nice. I’ve seen a lot of them, some of them really grab me and I think they’re fantastic. Others don’t do much for me. But, it is really important to keep the amount of each one down. The important thing to remember is that when they put out a movie poster for The Mummy they might’ve printed 5,000 or 10,000 of them, but almost all of them were used in a theater and then thrown away and only 5 or 10 might survive all the way from 1931 to now. But when you do a limited edition poster of 100 and you sell them for $100 then 20 years later all 100 of them are still there. So, it’s real important to keep the edition size low because if you do 100, there’ll be 100, but if you do 1,000, there’s going to be 1,000. It’s unlikely that 20 years later there’ll be 1,000 people looking for that, so the price will probably go down. But if you keep it to 100, the price can keep rising.

Scoop: Have there been any horror movies that you have wanted to watch simply because of the poster art?
BH: Yeah, I’ve been disappointed. It’s like Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, where it’s like, “Well, with that great of a poster it must be really worth seeing” and then you see the movie and you’re like, “Wow, that really wasn’t good at all.” Even on the best movies like Forbidden Planet they take tremendous liberties. It’s a really good movie, very intellectual and clever. But the poster shows you Robby the Robot holding the girl in his arms. Not only is the scene not in the movie, but it’s also not indicative of what kind of movie it is. But that’s how it was back then, they were trying to sell the movie, they didn’t care if they were being honest or not.

Scoop: eMoviePoster’s 18th Halloween Auction is coming up soon. Can you tell me a bit about what collectors will find in it?
BH: It has a really excellent assortment of top horror one-sheets, lobby cards, stills, and many other sizes. There are a lot from the 1930s through 1950s, but also more modern classics. I don’t think there would be a single collector of horror movie paper who would not find lots of items to bid on!

Scoop: Thank you so much for letting me pick your brain for a bit.
BH: Oh, absolutely.

eMoviePoster’s 18th Annual Halloween Auction will be held from October 26 through November 7, 2017. More details are available on their website and will be posted in Scoop.

Learn more about horror collecting in The Overstreet Guide to Collecting Horror.