Art for fuck’s sake

This is a piece of classic art:

Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare, or rather a variant upon the latter painted some years after the original. This, on the other hand…

This is a piece of shit, or rather a poster advertising a piece of shit, that being Walerian Borowczyk’s La bete from 1975… I’ve never understood how a basically respectable arthouse filmmaker got so trapped in the porn ghetto in the way Borowczyk did, so much so that he wound up making an Emanuelle sequel; even Jean Rollin (whose films are arguably arthouse but was not exactly “basically respectable”) never went quite that low and got out of the porn rut eventually. I don’t know who did this Italian poster for it, but when I found this via Tumblr I knew that whoever it was had evidently seen the Fuseli painting and thought it was worth ripping off.

In doing which, they arguably managed to kind of misrepresent the film a bit, cos the horse isn’t the titular beast—that’s actually some sort of rat/bear thing with a similarly mighty cock—although you do get quite a scene of two horses going at it in a not even remotely softcore manner. But looking at that poster, you might perhaps expect something else…

…and, looking at this other Italian poster for the film, you might expect that something else even more. Whoever was doing the promotional art for the Italian release was really trying to hype up that horse for some reason I’m not sure I want to contemplate…