Gallery Two — The Drive-In Years

Something changes here, and the posters change with it. The monster stops being the studio's property and becomes the independent producer's stock in trade — Roger Corman making a picture in a fortnight, Vincent Price lending it a face, American International selling it to teenagers at the drive-in. The fifties bring a different kind of fear. The creature is no longer a European aristocrat in a castle but something from the sky, the desert, the ocean floor, or the laboratory down the road. Then in the sixties and seventies the terror moves indoors again, into families and houses and children, and the posters begin to whisper rather than shout. Watch the type shrink and the empty space grow. By the end of this gallery a poster can frighten you with almost nothing on it.