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Preserving History: Authentic Objects Across Eras
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You get the sheet in these photographs: an original Belgian theatrical poster for The Hunchback of the Morgue — printed for the country's cinemas as Le Bossu de la Morgue in French and De Bultenaar van het Lijkenhuis in Flemish, both titles set right onto the same sheet the way a bilingual country demands. The paper names its own people plainly across the top: PAUL NASCHY, ROSSANA YANNI and VIC WINNER star, the direction is credited REGIE: J. AGUIRRE, and the film is flagged simply as COLOR. Everything on this page is read straight off that printed sheet and off the film's own history — nothing here is invented to dress it up.
The banner along the very top reads COSMOPOLIS-FILMS, the Belgian distributor that carried the picture into the country's theaters, with the little "presente / stelt voor" pairing that means the same thing in the nation's two languages. That name matters here beyond the artwork, and we will come back to it, because this exact sheet was preserved in the Cosmopolis Films archive and has been kept together as one collection since 2007.
📅 About the two dates: the poster was printed for the film's own cinema release. 2007 is only the year the surviving distributor archive was gathered and kept together - it is not a printing or reprint date.
Under its Spanish title El Jorobado de la Morgue, this is a 1973 Spanish gothic horror directed by Javier Aguirre — the "J. Aguirre" the poster credits — and written by its own star. Paul Naschy plays Wolfgang Gotho, a gentle, misshapen morgue attendant whose devotion to a dying woman, the only soul who ever showed him kindness, pulls him into the orbit of a scientist's forbidden experiments once she is gone. It is classic Naschy territory: tragic, gothic and unashamedly grim, less a story about a bell-tower hunchback than a European cousin of the old Frankenstein tales, all cellars and corpses and doomed love.
The picture is widely held to be one of Naschy's strongest, and his Gotho — repulsive and heartbreaking in the same breath — is the reason. Around him the poster's other billed names do real work: Rossana Yanni and Vic Winner (the screen name of the Spanish actor Victor Alcazar) were fixtures of the same wave of Spanish genre cinema that Naschy all but built single-handed.
To understand why collectors chase anything with this man's face on it, you have to know who he was. Paul Naschy — born Jacinto Molina Alvarez — is the single most important figure in Spanish horror cinema, an actor, writer and sometimes director who more or less willed an entire national genre into being. He is best remembered for his long-running werewolf, Waldemar Daninsky, a character he returned to across decades, but his range ran through every gothic archetype the old Universal monsters had staked out a generation earlier. Where America had Lon Chaney and Boris Karloff, Spain had Naschy, and fans there still speak of him in exactly those terms.
The Hunchback of the Morgue sits near the heart of that legacy. It is the kind of role — the outcast whose love curdles into horror — that let Naschy do the thing he did better than anyone: make a monster you pity even as you flinch. That is why his name rides at the top of this sheet in bold capitals, and why a poster carrying it is a genuine crossover piece between horror collecting and the specialist world of Spanish fantastic cinema.
Here is the part that makes this sheet its own object rather than one more copy of a familiar image. Belgium developed its own dedicated poster format for the films it imported — a compact affiche, roughly 22 by 14 inches, quite unlike the big American one-sheet or the tall Italian designs — and Belgian houses routinely commissioned or reset their own artwork and layout rather than simply reprinting whatever came from the film's home country. Add the country's two official languages, French and Flemish, printed together on a single sheet, and you get a poster that exists nowhere else on earth in quite this form.
That is exactly what you are looking at: the Spanish film, filtered through a Belgian distributor's eye, given a bold painted composition — the black-robed, screaming specter, the club raised over Gotho's snarling face, the grinning skulls — and captioned in two languages at once. A collector who already owns the Spanish or the export poster for this title still does not own this; the Belgian affiche is a separate animal, and that is a large part of why the format has its own devoted following.
The distributor line at the top of the sheet, Cosmopolis-Films, is not decoration — it is provenance printed right onto the paper. Cosmopolis was the Belgian distributor that released this picture into the country's cinemas, and this poster is unused distributor stock: the surplus that stayed in the company's own hands rather than being pasted up in a lobby and thrown away. Down in the base corner the printer even signs the work in tiny type, an Imp. Wagram, Bruxelles credit, the Brussels shop that ran the sheet.
When Cosmopolis Films itself passed into history, its paper archive could easily have been scattered to the wind, the way most distributor stock is — split up, sold off piecemeal, lost. Instead it was kept together as one collection since 2007, saved intact before that could happen. What that means for you is simple and worth saying plainly: this is not a poster that circulated on the open market for fifty years. It was held back, archived, and effectively there is only the one source for it. Sheets like this were never released to the public in the first place — and the copies with any future ahead of them are the ones collectors take home.
It rewards a slow look. The composition stacks its horrors top to bottom: a hooded, fanged figure shrieks out of a wintry blue field at the upper right, a skeletal claw with long yellow nails reaching down across the sheet; below it Gotho himself, dark-haired and desperate, swings a heavy club upward; and at the lower edge two bone-white skulls grin out from the shadow, over the blood-red brushstroke lettering of Le Bossu de la Morgue. The Flemish title runs in a clean blue band along the very bottom. It is lurid, theatrical and completely committed — precisely the flamboyant register the Belgian affiche was known for, pitched to stop a passerby cold on a cinema street.
This one lands hardest with a few particular people. There is the Paul Naschy completist, who tracks every title and every territory the man's films played and knows the Belgian release is its own catalog entry. There is the Spanish-horror and Euro-cult historian, for whom 1970s Iberian gothic is a serious field. There is the Belgian-poster specialist, drawn to the format itself — the affiche size, the bilingual titling, the locally set art. And there is the horror decorator who simply wants a genuine, characterful vintage original rather than a modern reprint. For all of them, the appeal doubles: it is a Naschy poster and a Belgian original at once.
This sheet picked up its age long before it reached me, and you should hear the detail from me rather than find it yourself. The paper has warmed to a cream tone. The top-right corner is bumped, with a short crease and a light rub along that edge. There are a few small brown age specks in the top margin.
None of that has moved since I rescued it. Everything here is kept in the dark at under 40% relative humidity and a steady 72°F, climate controlled — paper does not keep deteriorating on my watch, and this sheet will reach you exactly as described.
What it does not have is just as specific: no pin holes, no tape marks or residue, no staple holes, and no fold lines. Those are the marks a poster picks up on a cinema wall, and this one never went up. It was never folded, and it will arrive unfolded.
An original vintage Belgian theatrical poster from the film's release, printed in Belgium for its cinemas — not a modern reprint. It is unused distributor stock out of the Cosmopolis Films archive.
Jacinto Molina, Spain's most celebrated horror actor and writer, widely regarded as the Spanish counterpart to America's classic monster stars and best known for his werewolf character Waldemar Daninsky. He wrote and starred in this film.
Because Belgium printed its own dedicated affiche format and set its own artwork and layout rather than reusing the source country's campaign, and titled it in both French and Flemish. The Belgian poster is a distinct piece from every other country's version.
Le Bossu de la Morgue is French and De Bultenaar van het Lijkenhuis is Flemish — both mean "The Hunchback of the Morgue." Bilingual titling is the signature of a genuine Belgian sheet.
The archive of Cosmopolis Films, the Belgian distributor named across the top of the sheet, preserved together as one collection since 2007. These were never released to the public — they are archive stock, effectively from a single surviving source.
Javier Aguirre — the "J. Aguirre" credited on the poster — with Paul Naschy writing the screenplay and playing the lead.
It is worth stepping back to see the tradition this sheet belongs to. In a small country wedged between France, the Netherlands and Germany, with two official languages and a dense network of local cinemas, Belgium developed one of Europe's most distinctive film-advertising cultures. Rather than import a foreign one-sheet whole, its distributors leaned on local commercial artists and printing houses, who reworked each film into a compact, punchy sheet that had to speak to French- and Flemish-reading audiences at once. The result, over the decades, was a body of posters with a look all their own — bolder, denser and more graphically inventive than many of their neighbors' — and today the affiche belge is a recognized collecting field in its own right, prized precisely because a Belgian sheet is never simply a translation of someone else's poster. A piece like this is one small, genuine survivor of that culture.
Living with it is refreshingly simple. Flat, light and unmounted, it frames cleanly, and the affiche proportions suit a slim moulding with a neutral mat. As with any vintage paper, a few courtesies keep it exactly as it is: acid-free framing materials, UV-protective glass, a spot out of direct sunlight, and handling by the edges. Given that ordinary care, a genuine period Belgian poster will stay just as striking for the next keeper as it is today.
Some posters are worth owning because the film is famous; this one is worth owning because it sits at a crossing of things collectors genuinely chase — a Paul Naschy horror, a 1973 Spanish gothic, and a Belgian affiche with its own art and its own two languages, all in a single sheet that spent its life in a distributor's archive rather than on a wall. It claims no invented pedigree and needs none: the paper names its stars, its director, its distributor and its printer, and its history is exactly what it appears to be. The whole surviving supply of these sits together in one place, and the copies with a future are the ones that go home with the people who care. Take this one home and you are keeping a small, real piece of film history that would otherwise quietly disappear.
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