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The Crimson Skull
A masked outlaw band rides the Oklahoma range in a western made for audiences the studios would not serve.
What
A 1921 one-sheet for the Norman Film Manufacturing Company's all-Black-cast western, shot in the all-Black township of Boley, Oklahoma.
Why
Norman was a white-owned Florida company producing race films for segregated theatres, and its westerns gave Black performers the heroic parts Hollywood reserved for others. Most of the film is lost; the advertising is much of what survives to prove it existed.
Notice
The skull-masked rider — a genre-horror device grafted onto a straight western, decades before the two were routinely mixed.
“A frontier the mainstream screen refused to picture.”
Format
The full-resolution, color-managed file — restored honestly, yours to print and keep.
Size
$29.00
Provenance
- Film
- The Crimson Skull (1922), dir. Richard E. Norman
- Country / studio
- United States · Norman Film Manufacturing Company
- Format
- One-sheet (27 × 41 in.)
- Poster published
- U.S. one-sheet, 1921
- Source
- Wikimedia Commons
Rights: CLEAR. Public domain — U.S. 95-year rule (poster published 1930 or earlier). Gated by the poster’s own publication year, never the film’s. Cleared by registry on 2026-07-18.
From Silent Hollywood
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The Double Bill
Two one-sheets, hung as a pair — a double feature for your wall, at a pairing price of $270.00 for the two. Build one from any two one-sheets in the gallery.
Pair it in the gallery →A house of the Provenance family