PORTLAND, OR - With recent book releases like 'Ad Nauseum,' and the Facebook page 'Groovy Doom,' we at The Daily Ghost don't want to get too far behind the current movement of revisiting the dying art of black & white movie poster advertisements from your local papers, so time to finally unveil this little project of ours.
When I was a kid growing up in Martinsburg, West Virginia, my slow transition into being a movie buff was most evident on Sundays, when my father would bring home both the Washington Post and my favorite, The New York Times and its 'Arts & Leisure' section. Sure, in Martinsburg we had movie theaters like any town does, but it was always limited to just the bigger studio releases. So when that NYT came in, it was my weekly visit to a cinematic world that included smaller, much lesser-known films that I had no chance of seeing if and until they came to VHS, if and until the local video stores carried them, and the very big if of whether my parents would let me see them. So really, my only taste was through these posters.
So of course to savor those moments over the years I got out my trusty scissors, released those posters from the restraints of each week's newspaper and collected them in various categorized folders ... only for them to sadly go missing at some point as I got older, to never be seen again. Almost sounds mysterious, but likely it was my mother "finally" tossing them into the trash.
For a nostalgic trip back to those exciting days of discovery, I wanted to do a modern-day re-discovery of these 80s movie poster ads. For the past year I've been scouring old newspapers of the era from the Los Angeles area (and some Boston and NYC) to collect them again, but this time digitally so I can share them with you, my "devoted" audience. There really isn't a theme to this project besides it being 80s films, and late 70s as well, so it won't just be horror as other collections tend to be. This is all about the 80s, from horror classics, to sleaze, to blockbusters and comedies, including at some point art from my favorite movie poster artists Drew Struzan, whose documentary trailer can be seen here. This is an ongoing thing so we have just a few up so far, but updates should be frequent enough.
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