The Posters of Frankenstein : Italian The Revenge of Frankenstein

A wild-eyed, drooling Beast attacks a stunning Beauty on a rousing Italian poster for Hammer Films’ The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958).

The artist, “Sym”, is the extraordinary Sandro Simeoni, who would paint some 3000 movie posters in a career that spanned 50 years. He was equally at ease in all genres, ranging from Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960) to Dario Argento’s Profondo Rosso (1975), with westerns, gangster films, science fiction and romantic comedies in between.

Simeoni — sometimes identified as “Symeoni” — worked from stills, and the Frankenstein poster was likely inspired by posed promotional shots of Michael Gwynn’s twisted, cannibalistic Monster menacing Eunice Gayson.

Simeoni typically showed characters in motion: Running, jumping and lunging at each other, with frequent dimensional effects of hands, guns or blades leaping out at the viewer. Here, in a typically dynamic composition, the artist cranked up the tension with swirling colors, overlapping credits, and the Monster’s claw raised out of frame. The purple in the Monster’s coat is picked up in the title and the woman practically leans out of the image in a bright yellow dress with black trim to emphasize the exposed shoulder and cleavage.

Here is a glimpse at some of Sandro Simeoni’s innumerable posters…

I found the Revenge poster on the superlative Wrong Side of the Art! movie poster site specializing in horror, fantasy, cult and B-movie titles. New additions are blogged daily and the archives are searchable by film title, director, actor, year, genre and a wide range of sub-categories. You’ll want to bookmark this terrific site.

A list of 152 Sandro Simeoni movie posters. Click the highlighted numbers to see the images.

A selection of Simeoni posters at Pulp International.