Original Exploitation Movie Posters

Exploitation movie posters operate on pure visual impact — they were designed to be seen from moving cars, to stop pedestrians mid-sidewalk, and to make whatever was playing at the drive-in tonight sound unmissable. Our Exploitation collection covers the full arc of American independent genre filmmaking and the breathtakingly varied advertising art it produced: the blaxploitation cycle that made Pam Grier, Richard Roundtree, and Fred Williamson into stars; the women-in-prison films; the biker pictures; and the martial arts import wave. Shop the Exploitation collection for some of the most unself-conscious commercial art the film industry ever produced. Roger Corman is the presiding spirit — as producer, director, and the man who gave Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro, Peter Bogdanovich, and Francis Ford Coppola their first real work. The posters for his American International Pictures productions from the late 1950s through the 1970s are now recognized as classic examples of mid-century commercial illustration: brash, colorful, drawn by hand, and completely confident in their own shamelessness. The international dimension is significant. Italian genre cinema ran parallel to the American exploitation cycle and produced its own distinctive poster art — the 2-foglio format, printed by specialist Roman and Milanese houses on heavy stock with vivid offset lithography. German, Spanish, and Belgian variants for the same films offer independently commissioned illustration that often surpasses the American originals. Japanese B2 posters for American exploitation films are among the most requested items in this category; genuine first-release examples are increasingly scarce. Browse alongside our Cult, Gangsters, and Martial Arts collections for closely adjacent territory. Individual pages for Dirty Harry and Shaft cover key titles in more depth. All Film/Art Gallery movie posters and items are authenticated originals.