Do you remember the scene in “Jaws” when the shark emerges from the ocean as a muscle-ripped humanoid brandishing the severed head of Richard Dreyfuss? Or that part in “The Muppet Movie” when Kermit the Frog sticks everyone up with a pistol in one hand and a machine gun in the other?
You probably don’t, because they didn’t happen. But throughout the 1980s and ’90s in Ghana, hand-painted posters depicting such action-packed and absurdist scenes were used to lure African moviegoers to see Hollywood films.
At the time, small traveling cinemas known as “video clubs” — consisting of a flatbed truck, a television and a VCR — roved through Ghana’s towns and villages. With them rose a bootleg poster industry rooted in the idea that the zanier the art, the likelier people were to buy tickets. Sometimes the artists hadn’t even seen the films. But as Ghana entered the new millennium, this guerrilla poster art style began to fade away.
Thanks to Deadly Prey Gallery, it hasn’t disappeared completely. Founded 15 years ago by Brian Chankin, a onetime video store owner from Chicago, and Robert Kofi, a Ghanaian businessman, the gallery now sells these fantastical posters to cinephiles. Chankin and Kofi have also preserved the form by commissioning posters of new movies, working with the same artists who pioneered the style decades ago.
Recently, Deadly Prey held an exhibition at the Selva gallery in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn. Film fans riffled through bins filled with prints featuring Ghanaian depictions of “Free Willy,” with the orca eating Jesse alive, and of “The Warriors,” with a werewolf chasing the titular street gang back to Coney Island.
Tolu Owolabi, a film critic, bought a “Ratatouille” poster.
“That Remy the rat is decapitating someone on it creates an unexpectedness that only draws me to it,” Owolabi said. “I think lots of African cinema happened this way and still does — people using the resources they have to make what they can with a creative, guerrilla feel.”
Olu Campbell, a policy researcher, admired posters for “The Matrix” and “Cry-Baby.”
“They’re a reminder that, in the absence of culture coming through the front door, culture will find a way through the back door,” he said. “These posters, at a time when West Africa didn’t have cinemas like Regal or AMC, offered the chance to give people entertainment.”
Sitting at a table taking Venmo payments was Chankin. As the gallery grew crowded, he headed to a back room to make sure the most valuable posters were being handled with care. The oldest was a tattered flour sack-stitched poster for “Child’s Play,” priced at $3,000.
“I don’t know if we’d ever actually sell it,” he said. “The posters we have that are even older than this one, we don’t consider selling at all. They’re too historical. Our hope is to create a museum for them in Ghana one day.”
Chankin became transfixed by the posters around 2010, when a customer came into his video store, Odd Obsession, and showed him a copy of the book “Ghanavision.” He was so transfixed, in fact, that he tried buying some online.
“Finally, on the 50th page of a Google search, I found a website with all these Ghanaian posters,” Chankin said. “It was Kofi’s website. I wrote him saying, ‘I’m obsessed. Do you have any for sale?’”
Kofi wrote back, “Yes, I do, and I have many more,” and mailed off a few.
“Eventually, he suggests we start selling them in my video store, and that’s how we got started,” Chankin continued. “People eventually started asking if I had modern movies like ‘The Matrix’ and ‘Fight Club.’ I told them, ‘No, I don’t, because those probably weren’t made.’ But when I asked Kofi if he was still in touch with the artists, he said he was, and that’s how the new commissions began.’”
In Ghana, Kofi started approaching the painters who had pioneered the genre, men who signed their works with names like Leonardo, Mr. Nana and Heavy J. Early commissions included “Twin Peaks” and the indie film “Gummo.”
These days, Chankin runs Deadly Prey from his Chicago home, and he drives across the country in his Ford van to set up exhibitions. Kofi, who lives in Accra, works directly with their 11 artists, and he operates a Deadly Prey beach outpost that caters to tourists.
In a phone interview, Kofi recalled working for a video club as a boy in his coastal hometown, Winneba, where he walked around with hand-painted posters for “Predator” and “The Terminator.”
“When I realized it was all going extinct, I started buying up what posters I could,” Kofi said.
“As a Ghanaian, I want their art to continue and be preserved,” he continued. “When Brian and I realized people wanted to buy newly commissioned posters, we realized our gallery had a future. It’s been a dream come true to see.”
As the afternoon wound down at Selva, and film fans snatched up prints of everything from “The Fly” to “La Haine,” Aaron Hamel, a co-founder of Williamsburg’s Night Owl Video, stopped by. Thumbing through his stash, he considered that, regardless of the posters’ current cult status, their greatest legacy is perhaps far simpler.
“In terms of movie marketing, who wouldn’t have wanted to see these films?” he said. “Even though ‘Mrs. Doubtfire’ doesn’t include a scene where Robin Williams shoves a broom handle through someone’s head, I’d still want to buy a ticket.”
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