This artwork by the late Jeffery Jones is a pretty sweet image for a pretty sweet little 1981 movie. Dragonslayer was a neat little micro-epic with outstanding special effects, even by today's standards, and an above average story of an apprentice dragonslayer having to fend off not only the monster but an entire village to boot. The movie loses its way a bit in the wildly spectacular ending which while visually compelling is at odds a bit in tone to the rest of the movie. But overall an outstanding effort.
Here's a sketch Jones made as he constructed the poster.
And here is the final product, one of the more alluring posters from an era when posters were really nifty by and large.
"Vermithrax Pejorative", the dragon remains the best evocation of a dragon on the screen that I've ever seen, and that's saying something given the advances in special effects since that time forty years ago now. Since then of course there have been a host of dragons done with computer graphics and some are quite excellent such as those in Reign of Fire and of course Smaug for The Hobbit trilogy, but somehow with the myriad physical effects and some dandy stop motion, this little movie gave us a dragon that was indeed scary and without uttering a word was vile as well.
Marvel adapted this movie with art by Marie Severin, and the cover above by Earl Norem is effective if not especially opulent.
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