Still creepy after all these years…

Jan. 30, 2009
Posted by Noah

I just can’t help but shudder a little when I think about it. Hmmm… So big by about so big… It was a cardboard reprint of a movie poster for the original Dracula movie, with Lon Chaney – not the Style B One Sheet Dracula in the upcoming Movie Poster Auction, which got me thinking in the first place – and I was about six when it came in to our house. It was a gift from my parents.

“Um… Thanks, mom…”

It came with a companion: A Boris Karloff Frankenstein poster. All these years later, a grown man with a family, sitting in a cube in this beautiful building, I get a link for the star of the movie poster auction. It’s from the movie poster director Grey Smith. It’s a consignment he’s been waiting for with bated breath because the poster is so rare. I open it up – as you can right here. It’s Dracula. I shudder.

No doubt it’s a great poster, incredibly rare, expensive as all get out, yet all I can see is the Dracula poster from our house that my brother Cris insisted always hang in the hallway outside my room, because he knew how it creeped me out. And he knew I would have to walk past it every night in the middle of the night to get to the bathroom.

I suppose that it is the point of this poster – to be so scary – and that I should be grateful to the studio geniuses, and to Lugosi, for providing me with such supreme creepiness. The 1931 Dracula is still the archetype of the character and clearly this poster is a cornerstone piece in any major collection. I am afraid that were I alone with it, however, I would become so unsettled that I would do to it what I finally did to the poster that haunted me grades one through four. It involved our backyard, a dirt pit and some matches. My brother Cris was pretty mad. My parents just laughed.