“Movie Mojo”

This Chicago Cultural Center exhibit of movie posters from Ghana features hand-painted flour sacks advertising flicks with terror-inducing names such as “Slither” and “Married to a Witch.” The exhibition’s accompanying text points out, in a clinical fashion, that the posters elevate the culture’s fascination with Christianity and juju, or witchcraft, over the movie plot. While spiritual figures and personified animal images are rife, the phantasmagoric images also transcend the Ghanese streets in which they originally appeared. In a poster for “Married to a witch,” a man’s head boils in a blood-filled cauldron; it might not depict a scene from the movie (which plays on a projector in the corner) but the verisimilitude of husband-wife tempers makes Real Housewife promotional material—smiling faces, wine glasses hoisted high—look like false advertising.