Ghana’s movie posters lied shamelessly — and that is precisely why people now collect them

On a porch in Teshie, near Accra, Heavy J was painting blood onto a knife and sketching a skull on to a flour sack. The image suggested another cheap horror exploit, the sort of thing that once filled Ghana’s video clubs. In fact, the poster was for The Little Mermaid. The knife-wielding figure was the prince Eric, and the skull belonged to nobody in the film at all. The point was never accuracy. The point was attention.

That was the logic behind Ghana’s hand-painted film posters from the late 1970s to the early 2000s. Local artists were hired to advertise screenings at neighbourhood video clubs after organisers realised that the original film posters were too tame to draw a crowd. So the painters did what advertisers have always done when left unsupervised: they exaggerated, embellished and occasionally wandered off into fantasy. The films were merely raw material. Artists competed to produce the best forgery, as they rather disarmingly called it.

The practice faded around the turn of the century as electricity spread, televisions multiplied and video players became common enough to kill off many of the clubs that had sustained the trade. Painters moved on. The posters, meanwhile, escaped into another life. Books and foreign exhibitions turned them into objects of curiosity, then into collectibles. By the time interest in newly painted works dipped in the early 21st century, old and rare posters had already begun to command attention from collectors.

Deadly Prey Gallery now sits at the centre of that revival. Founded in 2012 by Robert Kofi and Brian Chankin, it works with 15 artists and sells the posters to online buyers, most of them in the United States. Commissioned pieces start at $600. The gallery’s role is part business, part curation and part damage control: Kofi matches artists to projects, shares his ideas with them and checks work in progress in their studios. The arrangement is efficient, which is more than can be said for the films themselves as they appear on the posters.

In Ashaiman, Stoger was working on commissions for Poltergeist and Gummo. Kofi wanted the cats in the Gummo poster to look uglier and the spaghetti dirtier. That may sound excessive, but it is entirely consistent with the tradition. Joseph Oduro-Frimpong of Ashesi University describes the style as a form of visualising the invisible: audiences had not seen the films, so the artists filled the gaps with imagination, sensationalism and a healthy contempt for restraint. The result was often more memorable than the source material.

Not everyone appreciated the liberty. Some viewers reacted with threats, insults and even violence when the posters promised scenes that the films did not deliver. Kofi recalled being beaten in the 1990s after people watched Double Impact and discovered that Jean-Claude Van Damme did not, in fact, decapitate anyone as shown on the poster. One can understand the annoyance. False advertising is one thing; theatrical beheading by poster is another.

At the Centre for National Culture in Accra, rows of these works now hang on wooden walls: Jennifer Lopez firing an arrow at a snake in Anaconda, a mouse emerging from Jamie Lee Curtis’ mouth in Halloween. They are absurd, vivid and oddly honest about the business of cinema marketing. Kofi calls the effort preservation. He is right, in his way. What is being preserved is not fidelity, but a distinctly Ghanaian habit of making the poster more interesting than the film, which may be the most enduring art form of all.

Written by Sandy van Dongen sandy.vandongen@alpineweekly.com