Vintage 1974 Le Maréchal de l'Enfer Belgium Movie Poster 🖼️ Paul Naschy Devil's Possessed Spanish Horror

Who Was Spain's King of Horror? 😈 Spain's King of Horror, on a Belgian Sheet

Size: 14" x 22" ~ Unused archive stock. Little to no wear. 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.

It's the original Belgian release poster for Le Maréchal de l'Enfer - El Mariscal del Infierno in Spain, Devil's Possessed later on home video. It's a 1974 Spanish-Argentine production, and it carries one credit horror collectors go looking for on its own: Paul Naschy. He's billed right under the title — "Avec Paul Naschy / Norma Sebre" — with a Technicolor credit beside the names.

🎭 Naschy Wrote This One Himself

Paul Naschy, born Jacinto Molina, didn't just star - he wrote it, and he modeled his Baron Gilles de Lancré on a truly notorious man, Gilles de Rais, the fifteenth-century French noble whose legend has been told for centuries and who's sometimes named as a source for the Bluebeard tale. León Klimovsky directed it as a loose horror take on Kurosawa's Throne of Blood, which itself came from Macbeth - a wonderfully odd family tree for a Spanish monster picture. Norma Sebre and Guillermo Bredeston share the billing with him.

🎬 One of Only Two Countries That Ever Screened It

Here's the fact that makes this particular sheet worth having: on its original release, this film played theaters in exactly two countries on earth — Spain and Belgium. That's it. Everyone else who ever saw it caught up later on home video, where it circulated in the 1980s as Devil's Possessed. So a Belgian theatrical poster for this title isn't one of dozens of national campaigns — it's one of only two countries' cinema posters the film ever had.

🌍 Why Belgian Posters Are Their Own Thing

Nobody but Belgium used posters this size, and theirs tended to go wilder than anyone's - bigger, brighter, nothing held back. Between the size, the graphics, and how limited the surviving supply is, Belgian sheets have become a favorite among collectors in their own right, quite apart from whatever else exists for a given film.

🎨 What's Actually Printed on This Sheet

The title runs across the top in heavy yellow blackletter, Le Maréchal de l'Enfer, over black. Under it Naschy scowls out of the dark, eye patch and beard and a gothic arch behind him, with three big arrows coming at him from both sides. Below, on a fiery orange-red, a chained woman screams with her wrists shackled over her head while a hooded torturer swings a club above smoking spikes. It's blunt, woodcut-style commercial art, and it earns the word gothic. In the lower corner sits the distributor's own mark: a round "ab" logo styled like a film reel, reading LES FILMS ARMAND BON — the Belgian house that put this title into cinemas. The text is French only; there's no Flemish line and no printed date anywhere on the sheet.

📽️ Out of the Cosmopolis Films Archive

This poster survives because it was never used. It comes from the archive of the now-defunct Cosmopolis Films, kept together as one collection since 2007. Cinema posters were printed to sell a film to theaters, not to the public, and the ordinary fate for one was to go up on a wall and get torn down. A distributor's own unused stock is the exception — paper that went from the press into storage and just sat there.