‘The Beast with a Million Eyes’ (1955).
 
Albert Kallis was working as a graphic artist with Saul Bass when the twentysomething B-movie director Roger Corman met him at a poster exhibition sometime during the mid-1950s. Corman liked the high-end artwork Kallis was putting out for the big Hollywood studios like Paramount and 20th Century-Fox. He wanted to know what it would take to have Kallis come and work for him? Kallis said he’d be only interested if after any “general conversations about the approach to the picture” all decisions on the poster’s artwork and style was left entirely up to him. Corman agreed. And that’s how he bagged the talents of one of the greatest movie poster artists of the 1950s and 1960s.

Corman made B-movies. Exploitation. Cheap thrills. Schlock horror. He knew he could make a ton of money if only he could get the teenagers to come and see his films. This was the time of the drive-in when movies came into town for a week and then were gone. When the film houses would only take on a movie if they could guarantee a hefty profit. What Corman needed was someone to sell his pictures with a poster that made the audience say “I gotta see that!” Kallis fully understood this. He produced artwork that made even the trashiest z-list feature look like it was the Citizen Kane of cheap thrills.

Kallis spent some seventeen years working as art director for Corman and then at American International Pictures—-going on to share responsibility (with Milt Moritz) as head of advertising and publicity. Kallis’s artwork exemplifies the best of movie poster technique and composition, taking key elements from a film to draw in the viewer and excite them enough so that they create their own mini-narrative. One look at these beauties and it’s more than apparent no movie could ever live up to the thrills of Kallis’s artwork.
 

‘The Day the World Ended’ (1955).
 

‘The Phantom from 10,000 Fathoms’ (1955).
 

‘It Conquered the World’ (1956).
 

‘She Creature’ (1956).
 

‘Fire Maidens from Outer Space’ (1956).
 

‘Girls in Prison’ (1956).
 

‘I Was a Teenage Frankenstein’ (with Reynold Brown) (1957).
 

‘Not of this Earth’ (1957).
 

‘Attack of the Crab Monsters’ (1957).
 

‘Astounding She-Demons’ (1957).
 

‘Voodoo Woman’ (1957).
 

‘Invasion of the Saucer-Men’ (1957).
 

‘Viking Women and the Sea Serpent’ (1957).
 

‘The Undead’ (1957).
 

‘The Blood of Dracula’ (1957).
 

‘How to Make a Monster’ (1957).
 

‘The Amazing Colossal Man’ (1957).
 

‘War of the Colossal Beast’ (1958).
 

‘The Screaming Skull’ (1958).
 

‘The Brain Eaters’ (1958).
 

‘Terror from the Year 5,000’ (1958).
 

‘The Spider’ (1958).
 

‘Night of the Blood Beast’ (1958).
 

‘The Giant Behemoth’ (1959).
 
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Famous Monsters: The eerie movie-monster portraits of Basil Gogos
The kick-ass movie poster art of Frank McCarthy
 
Via Monster Brains and Cine Material.