Monster movies have a long and horrible past, full of rubber monster suits and endless damsels in distress. Despite the poor quality of the props, and the limited technology, movies like King Kong managed to make an indelible imprint on the modern consciousness… with a little claymation and a lot of screaming. Movie poster art is not as limited by technology, and these are some of the coolest classic monster movie posters.

Godzilla Attacks!

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Godzilla has been the king of monster movies since Japan first strapped a guy into a giant rubber suit. Godzilla has battled giant, nefarious creatures from giant moths to a bionic clone. Sometimes destroying Japanese cities, but more often defending them (with a lot of collateral damage), Godzilla holds a permanent spot in any monster movie fan’s heart.

Aliens from Outer Space!

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Monsters from outer space have been a threat to small towns in America since cinema first took its first steps. The creatures are often wild looking, with oddly aggressive personalities, and the desire to kill anything and everything in their path.

Monster Marriages!

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In the past, people were terrified of accidentally marrying a ferocious beast. This fear carries with it some very interesting reflections on the society at the time.

Giants Wandering the Streets!

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Monsters used to be gigantic. We still see vestiges of the giant monster craze, but in general, the previous generation was obsessed with giants rampaging through cities with reckless abandon. One of the favorite themes; the normal person who through some strange radioactivity, begins to grow… and grow… and grow… The modern equivalent is most likely the zombie hordes that slowly expand their numbers… mindlessly spreading into larger and larger hordes.

Animals Gone Wrong!

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Classic movie monsters often came from beneath the earth, or the darkest corners of the planet, that lay unexplored. These monsters were typically outrageously large hybrids between dinosaurs and modern creatures, or were simply mundane animals struck with just enough radiation to make them… change.

Terrifying Creatures!

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We’ve got to hand it to the early filmmakers – their creatures were creative. Giant roaming eyes, all consuming blobs, and odd looking creatures that crawled out of some dark hole populated the screen in some of the craziest incarnations you could think of.

The World’s Most Diabolical Creatures!

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The true classic monsters: The Werewolf, Dracula, and Frankenstein’s Monster continue to be recycled and renewed to this day. These classic monsters stick with us because they capitalize on the huge variety of themes that can be drawn from them: man vs animal, death and immortality, technology and power.

Take the bold, dynamic, careful editing of vintage poster design and combine it with modern imagery like Star Wars and Army of Darkness, and what do you get? Tom Whalen’s “Strong Stuff”, a collection of incredibly fun and engaging posters that are a little bit geek art, a little bit Saul Bass.

Whalen’s interest in comics dates back to his childhood in a small town in Pennsylvania, where he spent many afternoons thumbing through comics in his grandmother’s candy shop. Inspired to draw every comic book character he could think of, Whalen eventually went on to art school and is known today for his signature “left-facing sideways profile style.”

“I love vector because of the flexibility in workflow that it affords,” Whalen said in an interview with vector.tutsplus.com.

“I am constantly tweaking composition and color and I think I’d drive myself utterly crazy if I were working in traditional media. I find myself thinking in Illustrator nowadays, meaning I can get away with doing a very loose sketch (if time constraints dictate) and flesh out most of the job once on the computer.”

So where does Whalen go from here? “I guess if I could daydream a little, I’ve always really wanted to do comic book cover work and create official movie posters for films,” he muses. See his full gallery of work at strongstuff.deviantart.com.