Enzo Sciotti, one of the most prolific and beloved Italian horror movie poster artist of all-time, has passed away at the age of 76.
Sciotti was born in Rome to a family of painters, including his father, Emanuele Sciotti. Sciotti began to draw and paint at a young age. When he was barely a teenager, his family mailed a portrait he drew of the then-new Pope John XXIII to the Vatican and the Pope actually wrote a letter to Sciotti, praising him for his talents. The film industry in Italy was booming in the 1960s and Sciotti's mother got him a job making film posters when he was just 16. Among his colleagues were other legendary Italian film poster artists, like Renzo Cenci and Ezio Tarantelli.
Sciotti and Tarantelli later started their own film poster studio. Sciotti produced many posters for "traditional" films meant just for Italy, but he was most famous for three specific types of film posters. The first was doing horror posters for Italian horror film directors, like Lucio Fulci, "The Godfather of Gore."
Sciotti's poster for Fulci's The House by the Cemetery is a classic...
Interestingly, one of the most famous Sciotti posters for his work with Fulci was the horror film, The Beyond...
Both The Beyond and The House by the Cemetery were Fulci films that had special effects and makeup design by the great Giannetto De Rossi, who died the same day as Sciotti.
Besides Italian horror films, another type of poster that Sciotti was known for was doing the Italian movie posters for notable American films, like one of his best, The Coen Brothers' Blood Simple...
He also did the Italian poster for Beetlejuice...
as well as the Italian poster for The Army of Darkness...
Sciotti had a real affinity for Sam Raimi's classic Evil Dead/Army of Darkness and has drawn many paintings over the years featuring the characters from those films.
The final area of Sciotti's oevere that he is best known for was doing the VHS cover art for some American movies in Italy (mostly Cannon films), like Bloodsport...
Sciotti also did the covers for a number of Italian horror comic books, as well, like the long-running Terror series...
Before he passed away, Sciotti estimated that he had drawn posters for over 3,000 films in his more than six decades of working in the film industry, and for a generation of fans, it would have been almost impossible to not see Sciotti's work during the 1980s and 1990s. He was a true movie art legend.
