A flour sack stretched across a wooden frame is not the typical canvas for a Disney fairytale, but Jeaurs Affutu paints what he needs to paint. On his porch in Teshie, near Accra, the artist known as Heavy J adds blood to a knife held by Prince Eric. A skull looms above. Neither element appears in The Little Mermaid. "We add more to make people interested," Affutu said. That philosophy, born from necessity in Ghana's late-1970s video club scene, has turned these wildly inaccurate, hand-painted film posters into a thriving global art market four decades later.
The Video Club Era and the Birth of "Forgery"
Ghana's neighborhood video clubs needed to fill seats. Original studio posters failed to cut through, so local artists took over. They painted on flour sacks and other cheap material, treating plot lines as loose suggestions rather than blueprints. The goal was spectacle, not accuracy. Artists across different clubs competed to produce the most eye-catching "forgery," a term they used without irony. A poster for a gentle animated film might feature gore and skulls. A straightforward action flick could sprout a decapitation that never made the final cut. The audience had not seen the movie, so the artists were free to invent.
The practice peaked from the late 1970s through the early 2000s, then faded as electricity and home video spread across Ghana. Video clubs shuttered. Painters moved on. Yet the posters had already slipped into foreign books and exhibitions, catching the eye of collectors who saw something far more interesting than faithful reproduction.
Deadly Prey Gallery Resurrects the Trade
In 2012, Brian Chankin, then running a video rental store in Chicago, connected with Robert Kofi, a Ghanaian who had grown up working as a "hype man" for video centers in Winneba and later began collecting and selling posters. Their partnership became Deadly Prey Gallery, named after an action film. The business now works with 15 artists, including Affutu, who has painted posters for 40 years.
Most commissions come from the United States. Action, science fiction, and horror titles dominate. The Exorcist, Star Wars, and Terminator are frequent requests. Prices start at $600 and climb based on canvas size and detail. Kofi, based in Accra, functions as both manager and art director. He assigns projects to the right painter, shares his vision, and makes regular studio visits to review works in progress.
Inside the Studio: When the Spaghetti Needs to Be Dirtier
In Ashaiman, about 11 miles from Affutu's porch, artist Benjamin Amartey (known as Stoger) was working on commissions for Poltergeist and Gummo. The latter poster depicted three cats and a man in a bathtub with a plate of spaghetti. Kofi reviewed the piece and delivered notes in Ga, Ghana's primary language: two of the cats were not aggressive enough, and the food looked too clean. "I want uglier cat scenes," he explained afterward. "The spaghetti has to be dirtier."
Stoger, a sculptor before he turned to poster painting in 1992, put it simply: "I use my imagination to make scenes that will attract people so that they'll love the poster."
Why the Exaggeration Runs Deep
Joseph Oduro-Frimpong, director of the Centre of African Popular Culture at Ashesi University and a collector himself, traces the style to a broader African tradition of "visualising the invisible." Because audiences had no reference for what the film actually contained, artists practiced what they called "imaginative painting." They amplified, distorted, and invented. The result was sensationalism by design.
That same sensationalism occasionally backfired. Kofi still laughs about the time in the 1990s when viewers beat him up after watching Double Impact. The poster had shown Jean-Claude Van Damme performing a beheading. The film did not. The audience felt duped, and Kofi paid the price.
From Street Advertisement to Gallery Wall
At the Centre for National Culture in Accra, dozens of Deadly Prey Gallery's colorful works hang on wooden walls. Jennifer Lopez fires an arrow at a snake in Anaconda. A mouse crawls out of Jamie Lee Curtis's mouth in Halloween. These pieces now occupy a strange cultural space: they began as disposable advertising for informal screenings, survived the death of the medium that created them, and have been reborn as fine art for Western film enthusiasts.
The arc says something about how cultural value gets assigned. A flour sack painted in Accra in 1995 and a limited-edition screen print from a Los Angeles studio now share the same wall space in collectors' homes. The difference is that one was made to sell a movie ticket in a neighborhood with no electricity, and the other was made because someone in Chicago thought that story was worth preserving.
What Comes Next
Deadly Prey Gallery continues to field commissions, and Kofi remains committed to the craft. "We are preserving a tradition," he said. "We are preserving a history." Whether that history stays alive through new orders or settles into museum archives, the posters have already outlasted the video clubs that needed them. The next question is whether a new generation of Ghanaian artists will pick up the brush, or whether the trade ends with the painters who remember the era firsthand.