Vintage Belgian Movie Poster The Hunchback of the Morgue 💀 1973 Paul Naschy Spanish Horror Le Bossu de la Morgue

Remember The Hunchback of the Morgue? 💀 A Belgian Original, and There's Nothing Else Quite Like It

Size: 14" x 22" ~ Unused archive stock. Slight to minor wear and minor edge discoloration does not affect the image, nor even close (see pictures). Everything here is stored in the dark, under 40% relative humidity, at a steady 72°F, climate controlled - whatever age a sheet shows, it had before it came to me.

I get a kick out of handing this one to people. Belgium is the only country in the world to use posters of this size, and they were very flamboyant compared to their counterparts across the globe. Between the size, the graphics, and how few of them survive, these are a favorite among collectors - and this one carries a genuinely great image to go with the pedigree. It's Le Bossu de la Morgue, the Belgian release of Paul Naschy's The Hunchback of the Morgue, printed for Belgian cinemas in both French and Flemish right on the one sheet: De Bultenaar van het Lijkenhuis runs in white on blue along the bottom.

🎬 The Film: El Jorobado de la Morgue, 1973

Under its Spanish title, this is a 1973 gothic horror directed by Javier Aguirre, released that July. Naschy co-wrote it with Aguirre and Alberto S. Insúa, and plays Wolfgang Gotho, a gentle, misshapen morgue attendant whose devotion to a sickly young woman - the only person who was ever kind to him - pulls him into a mad scientist's scheme once she dies: bring back bodies, and she'll live again. It's more European cousin-of-Frankenstein than bell-tower Quasimodo, all cellars and doomed love, and it's widely rated one of Naschy's strongest performances - repulsive and heartbreaking in the same breath, which was always his particular gift. Rosanna Yanni and Víctor Barrera round out the billed cast - up at the top of the sheet she's billed as ROSSANA YANNI, right under Naschy. She's Argentine, born in Buenos Aires; she spent a couple of years modelling in Italy, came to Madrid in 1963, and made more than forty films between then and 1980 - this was one of her pictures with Naschy, along with La marca del Hombre Lobo in 1968 and El gran amor del conde Drácula.

The role paid off for Naschy, too: it won him the Georges Méliès award for his performance at the 1973 Paris festival of fantastic cinema. And there's a Belgian twist I love - the script took a prize at the Antwerp film festival in 1976, and the story goes that Naschy went and collected it without a word to Aguirre, who didn't find out they'd won for ten years.

🧛 Paul Naschy, and the Man Behind "Vic Winner"

Paul Naschy - born Jacinto Molina Álvarez - is the reason a poster like this gets chased. He's the central figure of Spanish horror cinema: actor, writer, occasional director, and the man who more or less willed the genre into existence there on his own, most famous for his recurring werewolf, Waldemar Daninsky. Spanish fans talk about him the way we talk about Lon Chaney or Boris Karloff - he was often called the Spanish Lon Chaney, or the Spanish Karloff - and this film sits near the top of most people's list of his best work. He even got to meet Karloff himself, in 1966, working as an extra on an episode of I Spy that was being shot out in the Spanish countryside.

A bit of trivia worth knowing while you're looking at the sheet: VIC WINNER, billed third, was the screen name of the Spanish actor Víctor Barrera, who used it across a run of Spanish horror and fantastic-cinema releases from this same stretch of years. Barrera came from Carmona, in the province of Seville, and he'd worked abroad in Venezuela and Italy under another screen name, Víctor Alcázar; once he was making pictures in Spain he switched to Vic Winner, and 1973 alone put him in four films with Naschy - this one, El espanto surge de la tumba, El gran amor del conde Drácula and La rebelión de las muertas. The way Barrera told it, he, Naschy, Aguirre and Manu Leguineche set up their own production company, Janus Films, and sold four pictures before they'd started any of them - and this was one. Later on he went behind the camera himself, writing and directing El terrorista in 1978.

🎨 Reading the Sheet

The painted composition stacks its horror top to bottom. Upper right, a hooded, fanged figure shrieks out of a cold blue field, a medallion swinging at its chest; a long-clawed white hand reaches down across the sheet toward Gotho below, who swings a heavy wooden club upward with a snarl on his face. Two bone-white skulls sit in the shadow at his shoulder, right over the blood-red brush lettering of Le Bossu de la Morgue. "REGIE: J. AGUIRRE" and "COLOR" are set in small white type beside the hooded figure. It's lurid and theatrical in exactly the way the Belgian affiche was known for - built to stop somebody walking past a cinema.

🗄️ Straight Out of the Cosmopolis Films Archive

The banner across the top - COSMOPOLIS-FILMS, presente / stelt voor - names the Belgian distributor that put this picture into the country's theaters. This sheet comes from the archive of the now-defunct Cosmopolis Films, kept together as one collection since 2007: unused distributor stock that never went up on a cinema wall. Down in the base corner, the printer signs its own work too - Imp. Wagram, a Brussels print house - in small type below the Flemish title band.