Victor Moreno Design Interview

Greetings Ghoulies!

Here, we’re talking to Victor Moreno, a local Arizona artist and entrepreneur. He’s been very active in the community doing film screenings, presentations, comic and horror conventions – you’ve probably seen him somewhere!

Hey Victor! So to say that you’re “kinda into old genre films” would be an understatement. What differentiates a “genre film” from a plain old “normal” one?

Hey Daniel! “Genre” films are a term distributors came up with for movies that have a very specific interest, usually a nice way of saying the selling point of the movie wasn’t a big star or budget (regular movies), but rather the subject matter. So genre films tend to be the stuff a lot of like-minded geeky folks like. Stuff like science fiction, horror, space opera. etc. So if you’ve seen and enjoyed movies like Star Wars, Frankenstein, Star Wars – well then you’re a genre film fan!

You founded Cult Classics here in Arizona; what’s that all about?

Cult Classics is a monthly screening series I founded in July of 2011, sponsored by Zia Records. Every month, me and my staff of likeminded film and art fans screen a “cult classic” movie; by that I mean a movie that either wasn’t greatly received when it first came out but has developed a strong following or one that was popular when it came out that our audience wishes they could’ve gotten to see on the big screen but they weren’t old enough or even alive when it was released. We started in a small theater in downtown Mesa seating 70 people and over time we routinely get monthly crowds of hundreds of people who come to our events to relive their youth and share their favorites with their spouses or families.

On top of that, we offer collectible art prints for all of our shows every month. Typically, I tend to choose a lot of movies that I’d enjoy doing a poster for – so our roster of films is pretty varied and we have a core group of people who collect our posters every month now. We actually offer 2 posters per movie and tend to keep it a secret until right next to the screening, so our regulars and fans have a lot of faith they’re getting an awesome poster sight-unseen.

We also have a great interactive element to our shows. We have pre-shows where we let the audience vote on our next film choice via yays or boos after each trailer shows and stick in classic commercials for toys, or old drive in reels and funny clips to make it fun to come back every month!

What films have you screened so far?

Our first film we screened was Army of Darkness to a sold out crowd so we had to add a second showing for overflow. Over the year, we’ve shown movies like Shaun of the Dead, Labyrinth, Back to the Future, Gremlins, The Life Aquatic, RoboCop, Edward Scissorhands, as well as the Arizona premieres of some great new indie movies like Juan of the Dead, Cuba’s first zombie comedy and the Arizona premiere of Battle Royale, a classic Japanese film from 2000 based on a popular manga that inspired the Hunger Games.

Last month, we had our biggest single film screening with 220 people with the vampire movie The Lost Boys at Pollack Tempe Cinemas. We did a couple of posters for that, including a really fun comic book inspired poster featuring the Frog Brothers styled after a 1980’s Marvel Comic cover that sold out at the show. Our Halloween show on October 5th is Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice and the pre-sales for that have been extremely strong and that may top Lost Boys. More info on that is available at CultClassicsAZ.com and tickets are up at http://beetlejuice.brownpapertickets.com

What is it that you love about old genre movies?

There’s a fun sense of escapism in watching them. It’s fun to lose yourself watching Jack Burton fight undead Chinese warriors in Big Trouble in Little China and see Snake Plissken fight his way out of New York being chased by a towncar with chandeliers attached to it in Escape from New York. Ultimately, I like the community aspect of screening films and creating and cultivating an audience of likeminded film fans who appreciate the same things I do, collect art and movie posters and having an environment that is fan friendly and inclusive.

For me, there’s also a big nostalgia factor in being able to show movies I loved as a kid and being able to share my artistic take on them with people who appreciate it and send me photos of how cool the art looks framed in their house or office.

How many movie posters have you illustrated so far? What’s your process?

I’ve honestly started to lose track of how many movie posters I’ve done over the years. It’s easily getting close to 100 at this point for various events and promoters who’ve liked my artwork and have asked me to design artwork for their events. For Cult Classics, I’ve done maybe close to 20 and have had other local artists come aboard and illustrate posters for events I was promoting as well to share something I have fun with.

Personally, for my posters. I illustrate the posters by hand the old fashioned way with pencil and pen on bristol to start with. I then take that artwork, scan it into my computer and clean it up in Photoshop and take the line art and import that into Adobe Illustrator where I reduce the artwork into vectors. By creating vectors based on the line art, I can reduce or expand it to any size and then I take that vector line art and import that back into Photoshop where I color the image, add background/texture and text using my background as a graphic designer and make that into a finished art piece.

So, ultimately its a combination of traditional and digital.

You seem to really like the Horror genre; what’s your stance on Halloween?

I think Halloween is fun and let’s everyone get a little looser than they would be. My goal with my events is to create that feeling at least once every month rather than once a year.

As a kid, what’s the coolest Halloween costume you dressed up in?

In 5th grade, I dressed up as a ninja for Halloween and my dad collected weapons so I took a real sword to school and thankfully I didn’t slice anyone up or chop off my own arm. The fact that no one noticed still amazes me.

What are you bringing to our Monster Market?

I’ll be bringing some artist proofs of some of our out of print illustrated posters from Cult Classics and some vintage spooky themed prints and crafts. I’ll also be doing custom sketches, so any attendees who’d like an illustration of themselves or their family as a vintage spooky monster can get one from me, get their picture taken and come back at the end of the show and have a fun keepsake for the holidays. Who wouldn’t want a picture of themselves as a zombie or frankenstein?

What’s the BEST obscure spooky movie that Keen Halloween Patrons should see, but probably haven’t?

I could go really crazy and unobtainably obscure. But I think a lot of people haven’t gotten around to a lot of the older Universal Monsters classics like James Whale’s Frankenstein from 1931 with Boris Karloff or that more people have probably seen Tod Browning’s Freaks than they have his Dracula with Bela Lugosi. So I’d suggest those, which are pretty spooky, versus something more modern and gory.