Christian McLaughlin isn’t just a guy with good taste in cult cinema; he’s a full-blown connoisseur of the sleaze-slicked, blood-soaked, garishly erotic underbelly of 20th-century film history. His house? Think Vatican City for VHS degenerates. His collection? Less a pile of posters than a visual archive of cinematic perversion, pulp kink, and celluloid psychosis.
Every now and then, my pal McLaughlin slashes prices in what he once dryly called the “Cruel Summer” sale over at Westgate Gallery. Unfortunately, that has now turned into what he is calling the “Liquidation Sale”. And while the discount angle is fine and all, that’s not really the point. What matters is this: Christian knows exactly what he’s doing, and he’s been doing it a long time. If you’ve ever wondered where the most batshit beautiful movie posters of the last century have gone—French giallo, Italian sleaze, American XXX—he’s got them. Not just some. All of them. You don’t curate a gallery like Westgate by accident. You do it with obsession, taste, and probably a touch of madness.
So let’s talk about the madness.
Take the fevered psychosexual hysteria of Torso (1973), the Sergio Martino giallo-slash-slasher hybrid that reads like Alfred Hitchcock after a bottle of absinthe and a nervous breakdown. The poster doesn’t whisper “suspense” so much as scream decapitated co-ed in peril, with that iconic yellow backdrop and power saw branding it with industrial menace. It’s less about plot and more about impact—like much of giallo, really.
Then there’s the utterly unhinged Du sang pour Dracula (aka Blood for Dracula), directed by Paul Morrissey but practically soaked in Andy Warhol’s aura of ironic decadence. Udo Kier vamps around looking like a melancholic corpse on a juice cleanse, surrounded by virginal peasant girls who’ve never even heard of iron supplements. The poster could hang in a museum…or a sex dungeon.
Things only spiral further from there.
John Waters’ Polyester gets the full Odorama treatment (yes, scratch-and-sniff cards were a real thing), and the accompanying poster is a hot-pink fever dream of Divine’s demented domestic tragedy. If Leave It to Beaver had a glue-huffing stepdad and a foot fetish, it might come close to what Polyester achieves. You don’t just hang this poster—you submit to it.
From there, we’re off to the absolutely unhinged Prison Babies, a sleaze epic about “the true story of teenage girls in prison”. The art is all jailbait cheesecake and softcore sadism – “sex behind bars”, they warn us – as a deterrent. And then there’s The Seduction of Amy, whose cherry-popping metaphor is about as subtle as a mallet to the skull. And let’s be honest—subtlety is overrated.
Le Jardin des Tortures, meanwhile, leans into Hammer Horror vibes, with Jack Palance, Peter Cushing, and the kind of Victorian hysteria that makes you want to wear lace gloves and commit murder. The artwork screams EC Comics with a Euro twist.
And then there’s the pièce de résistance of punk trash: Punk Story, a wild Italian reissue of Female Trouble or Pink Flamingos (or maybe both—it’s hard to tell with foreign markets). Divine dominates the throne while Waters’ regulars mug in the background, painted like a glammy fever dream cooked up by a horny teen on cough syrup.
This is the stuff of dreams—or nightmares, depending on how you were raised.
These posters weren’t just movie marketing, they were transgressive art, shouting from grindhouse marquees and sticky-floored porno theatres. They promised more than plot. They offered perversion, power, kitsch, and taboo. They were pulp psychedelia wrapped in celluloid skin, designed to make you look twice—and maybe never look away.
Because really, what’s more beautiful than bad taste, exquisitely framed?
