Now Playing: Nightmare on Elm Street 2

We here at the Cult Film Club not only love great, weird and obscure films, we also did all the work that went into marketing them. One of the marketing aspects we really have a huge soft spot for in our hearts is all the cool ads that used to run in the weekend editions of every local newspaper. Thanks to the exhaustive efforts of the Google newsprint archiving team, there are hundreds of thousands of scanned newspapers available right at our fingertips, which means that there are a metric ton of movie ads. We recently showcased our love for these ads in one of our Concession Stand episodes that highlighted the amazing book recently released by 1984 Publishing called Ad Nauseam featuring the amazing horror movie ad collection of Michael Gingold.

Whenever we pick a new film to cover on the podcast we also love to dig through them to find some choice examples of the ads that ran back in the day int he google archive, so we figured why not also share them here at the Cult Film Club! Our most recent podcast focuses on the highly underappreciated 1985 horror sequel A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge. So here are some of our favorite newspaper ads that ran around November of ’85…

This first example is from the Birmingham Free Press and ran on November 8th, 1985. Man, having to choose between seeing Krush Groove and ANOES 2? That’s is like our personal Sophie’s choice…

This next example is very similar in layout, though the New Line Cinema logo is a bit different and the pull quotes changed up. This ad ran in the New York Times on November 8th, 1985 as well.

This third ad is from a Philly paper (the exact publication escapes us), but it features the rad original poster artwork instead of just a closeup on Freddy’s mug. This one ran on November 1st, 1985, the opening weekend for the film. Notice the second run double feature of Beverly Hills Cop and Ghostbusters at the top. Damn, we miss the 80s…

Speaking of double bills, we also found this rad example of a double feature of the 1st and 2nd Nightmare films. This one is from the same Philly paper, but I believe about a month or so later as they were looking to build a second wind for ANOES 2 by pairing it with the first flick.