"From Drew Struzan's unforgettable posters for Indiana Jones and Back to the Future to Bob Peak's incredible work on posters for Apocalypse Now, Superman, and Star Trek: The Motion Picture, the marketing dollars that went straight to visual artists were clearly well spent. The bygone era of movie poster art had one other reigning champion, the renowned artist Renato Casaro."
"The one-of-a-kind 1972 film from director Andrei Tarkovsky has plenty of striking visuals of its own. Thanks to the near-perfect 1961 novel from Stanislaw Lem, the story of an intelligent, bewildering planet, and the ghosts it creates, has haunted science fiction circles for generations. Casaro's poster is a perfect representation of the film: Is this astronaut a ghost? Haunted by ghosts? Yes, it's all of the above. Maybe."
"You'd be forgiven if you thought this striking poster for Conan: The Barbarian was something done by fantasy artist Frank Frazetta. And that's because with this one, Casaro knew his audience. Just as Frazetta helped redefine sword-and-sorcery art, Casaro figured out how to bring that style to the first poster for the first Arnold Schwarzenegger-led Conan movie. He later repeated this trick with the 1985 fantasy film Red Sonja."
Renato Casaro produced lush, painterly film posters that resembled book covers and dominated science fiction and fantasy marketing in the 1960s–1980s. His work sits alongside Drew Struzan and Bob Peak as standout poster art of that era. Casaro created memorable imagery for films such as Solaris, Conan: The Barbarian, Red Sonja, Flash Gordon, Dune, and others. His Solaris poster evokes the film's ghostly ambiguity through an isolated astronaut image. His Conan and Red Sonja posters adopted a Frazetta-like sword-and-sorcery aesthetic tailored to audience expectations. The Italian artist died at age 89.
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