‘Grizzly’: How a Legendary Comic Book Artist Turned a B-Movie into a Blockbuster
“18 Feet Of Gut-Crunching, Man-eating Terror,” cried the amazing poster.
Grizzly opened 49 years ago, on May 21, 1976, where it became the highest-grossing independent film of all time, until it was de-throned by John Carpenter’s Halloween two years later.
What made it a must-see? The stunning poster of a terrifying bear about to devour an unsuspecting blonde enjoying a campfire, drawn by legendary comic book artist Neal Adams.
When he wasn’t drawing comics (and creating Batman villains like Ras Al Ghul and Man Bat), Adams (who passed away in 2022) did movie posters.
“I drew the posters for Michael Crichton’s Westworld, Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator, and Grizzly,” he told Dread Central in a previous interview.
For the ’70s killer bear classic, a friend in advertising told Adams that they needed a good poster for a lousy bear movie. “They wanted a Jaws-type image for it,” Adams explained,
“I was on a tight deadline for it; they needed it fast. So I knocked the Grizzly poster out in two days! They built the ad campaign around my poster,” he laughed.
“They wanted it to look scary and not like a B-movie,” Adams said. “It’s Jaws-in-reverse, the creature’s at the top, the girl is at the bottom. But they wanted ‘Jaws in the woods’.
“Guys would come up to me for years, told me they ran to see that lousy bear movie because of my poster,” the artist chuckled.
“I sold every one of those kids out. I had to tell ’em, ‘Sorry, tricking you into seeing it was my job!'”
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