A ‘video nasty’ poster made a nice price at the Excalibur (30/27/24% buyer’s premium) auction in Elstree on January 24. Estimated at £150-250, the charmingly titled Zombie Flesh Eaters (1979) Quad design by Tom Beauvais took £1000.
Lucio Fulci’s masterpiece of the genre is regarded as a classic from that late 1970s-early ’80s era.
Regarding Zombie Flesh Eaters, Beauvais told the filmonpaper.com website: “I remember the funny moment when we were first briefed on what the distributor wanted from us. This fellow from the distribution company came in and he was a well-spoken, army officer type who strode into our office and said ‘right chaps, here’s what I’m looking for…’ and he proceeded to tell us that he wanted to see ‘bodies coming out of the earth’ and New York in the background.
“He then said ‘I don’t want to see any blood at all but you can paint plenty of worms and slime’.
“There was little in the way of press material and no stills to work from so I did what I thought he’d respond well to, with a large putrefied hand bursting out of the ground. I actually painted it by holding my own hand up to a mirror and making sure I captured the right anatomical details before making it more ghastly. Most of the figures I just drew from my imagination.”
Beauvais designs appear on several famous film posters such as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969).
Bullitt on target
Bullitt poster – £1500 at Aston’s.
A British double-crown film poster in rare rolled condition promoting the 1968 Steve McQueen classic Bullitt, famous for its San Francisco car chase scene, took £1500 at Aston’s (20% buyer’s premium) on January 16.
Chris Aston, managing director of the Dudley saleroom, said: “The buyer was a young dealer/ collector in his early 20s. I had a chat to him and he’d recently quit his job to go full time into the buying and selling trade.
“He liked the Bullitt poster for himself though, so says he will at least keep it for a few years before putting it for sale.”
This difficult to find 20in x 2ft 6in (51 x 76cm) poster featuring pen and ink artwork of McQueen was estimated at £100-200 in the Entertainment & Memorabilia auction.
