Italian film poster designed in 1983 for the cult classic Videodrome. The red text is set in all-lowercase Futura Black Agency. It translates to “a terrifying new weapon” / “First it controls your mind… then it destroys your body”. The title itself is shown in distorted sans-serif letters. For the most part, the billing block appears to be in all-caps Univers Condensed, but it’s interspersed with various non-matching glyphs.
1 Comment on “Videodrome Italian movie poster”
Thank you for this contribution!
I have adjusted the ID for the red text from Futura Extra Bold to Futura Black Agency. Not only is it (even) heavier. It also includes the two forms for g which can be seen next to each other in “distrugge”.
Futura Black Agency is not a canonical member of Bauer’s Futura. It belongs to Castcraft’s Futura Agency, which additionally has ten numbered weights (1–10) plus Shadow and Outline styles. These appear to be copies of neo-Futura by Headliners, a phototype adaptation and weight extension of Paul Renner’s design. Futura 10 Agency follows Twentieth Century Ultrabold. Futura Black Agency, the heaviest weight, seems to be an original addition by Castcraft. It was digitized in the early 1990s as OPTI Futura Black Agency. Castcraft is long defunct.
Not sure what’s going on in the billing block. That font likewise looks like an inofficial version, not the original Univers Condensed. I briefly checked my Castcraft catalog, but didn’t find an adaptation that has all these glyph variants: for example, I see R’s with diagonal and with curved legs, K’s with arms that meet at the stem and such where the lower one doesn’t reach all the way to the vertical, as well as top-heavy forms for C and S.