A collection of vintage movie posters — all porn

I pinched this from Colin’s Facebook feed, and I’ve been engrossed looking at the posters ever since: X-Rated Collection of Adult Movie Posters From the 60s and 70s.

As the site says:

X-rated movie poster designs are imaginative and diverse. Though their execution can be primitive, this simply adds to their charm. When coupled with risqué and often witty taglines, the posters are a winning mixture of the amusing and the stylish.

Nearly all X-rated posters from this era were designed by unknown artists, although similarities in technique and approach can often be identified. One exception is Emmanuelle, where the distributors hired designer Steve Frankfurt – the genius behind countless movie posters and the writer of some of cinema’s most memorable taglines. Emmanuelle‘s simply reads: ‘X was never like this‘. This award-winning poster came to embody ‘porno chic’.

The posters were frequently vague and misleading to audiences. Director Radley Metzger, for example, imported foreign movies such as Days Of Sin And Nights Of Nymphomania (Mellem Venner – Holland, 1963) and The Weird Love Makers (Kyonetsu No Kisetsu – Japan, 1964) but then marketed them as American films to ensure their appeal to a wider audience. The poster for The Weird Love Makers uses simple graphics with an intriguing tagline: ‘They do everything‘. Such slogans promised far more than the movies themselves could ever deliver.

As I say: the vintage designs and the tame-by-today’s-standards titillation are totally awesome. I don’t think it would fit in with my current decor, but they have a number of posters for sale, too. Of course, the cheapest ones I can find still go for £75. Which is a little too steep for me.