There are days when I feel like Kill Bill was the absolute best Quentin Tarantino has ever been. It’s been sitting super high on my personal Tarantino shortlist for a long time and there are indeed a lot of highlights to be found in these films. Overall it’s a tremendously enjoyable pop culture round trip. A true 60s and 70s blaxploitation galore with QT behind the lens in full force and effect. And it for sure stands as a staple in Quentin Tarantino’s career as being a distinctive turning point from rather realistic auteur films to sprawling cinephile extravaganzas.

Virtually every scene is choreographed down to the tiniest bit. When Robert Richardson’s virtuoso camera work asks for a proverbial dance with a colourful cast of characters, the screen becomes a stage and a simple revenge flick turns into an epic classic.

Musically it’s no difference. Tarantino did what he always does best in compiling the most diversive yet coherent soundtrack albums out there, with songs from all over the place. Yet for Kill Bill he for the first time threw orchestral scores into the mix, thus gloriously elevating his film to another level. There are scenes in it that perfectly capture the power of film music, even if the compositions haven’t initially been written to accompany the scenes Tarantino saw fit. But when Paula Schulz starts hammering her fist into the inside of her coffin, all the while Ennio Morricone builds a slow but steady crescendo which finally climaxes into glorious euphoria as our heroine finally arises back from the dead, it absolutely makes me wanna jump from my seat, fistbump into the air and scream “yes! yes! YEEESSSS!!!” It’s fucking fantastic! In moments like these Kill Bill still is my absolute favourite Tarantino flick and will probably remain so forever.

The film has been split into two parts for runtime reasons, but I couldn’t and still can’t decide which one I prefer. The Japanese thrill-ride of Volume 1 or the Western (melo)drama of Volume 2. Either way, I’ve definitely adopted this concept for this project of mine and split the whole collection into different sets of two’s, each with its own style and flair.

This remake of the official album cover of Kill Bill: Volume 1 (#1) not only kicks off this collection, but was also the very first Kill Bill cover I did as part of this project. Except for the changed logo, it matches the official design. However, if you search for the official cover online, you’ll find it in many different shades of yellow. I have chosen the most beautiful one for my remake :)

Volume 2 (#2) is more or less the equivalent with “inverted” colors, which may have been floating around the net as a DVD cover.

Another remake of an official album cover (#3), but I’ve also adjusted and improved little things here. For example, I enlarged the image crop of the katana sword so that the entire tsuka (Japanese for “handle”) is now visible. In addition, the existing title logo has been replaced with a new one, which in my opinion is much nicer. The cover for Volume 2 (#4) is again a twin with “inverted” colours and incorporates the official teaser poster of the movie

For this set of gorgeous covers featuring Beatrix Kiddo in her wedding dress, I was lucky enough to find the blood red version in quite good quality, since I’m not sure if it’s an official design or a fan re-work of the official poster, though the slightly enlarged boobs suggest the latter… Anyway, I made sure that the positioning of both images matched each other and then set about creating text-free versions so that I could place my customized film logos. Funnily enough, the Hattori-Hanzo logo on the katana was missing on the official Volume 2 cover (#6), so I fixed that as well.

This particular cover for Volume 1 (#7) was quite a challenge as I had to reassemble the photo of the bride from several individual pieces without destroying the “Kill is Love” graphic above. Why did I do that? Because I couldn’t find a high quality version of the whole image, even though this very design is actually the official Japanese CD release of the Kill Bill: Volume 2 soundtrack. But for my purposes it was much better suited as Volume 1, serving as a counterpart to the Japanese teaser poster that shows the bride on her lengthy trip through the Californian desert (#8).

Two graphic design covers that do without any official film (or marketing) footage and instead rely entirely on the strengths of typography. I actually made the first one (#9) sometime during the summer of 2004, only to do a high resolution version of it now – almost twenty years later. The second one (#10) is a full recreation of the logo that appears in the end credits of Kill Bill: Volume 2.

Before we get to the fan art source images, here are two concluding covers for which I was able to use two gargantuan promo shots of Uma Thurman. There’s a lot of detail work in these covers, like e.g. the reflection at the bottom of the cover or the shadow cast by the katana sword on the text underneath. It’s little touches like these that I love working on.

Kill Bill was Quentin Tarantino’s first work in which he really put emphasis on the credits. Both the opening credits in their muted, black and white noir look, as well as the end credits, of which there are even two different ones back to back at the end of Volume 2 ( three, if you count the endcrawl). Each one impresses with a deliberate choice of fonts and music and results in a fitting and worthy conclusion to this epic film.

This set was based on two absolutely magnificent posters by London-based creative Karl Fitzgerald, who describes his approach as follows:

My work largely focuses on the environment of the film, and the relationship of the landscape to the characters. I look to paint the moment of tension before the action, or the immediate aftermath. For me, this has more emotional impact than the action itself.

In using these posters, I mainly wanted to emphasize the black-and-white aesthetics of the film. That’s why it was important to me to only use fonts from the closing titles. I even had to go so far as to extract the composer’s credits directly from the film, as this particular font was simply nowhere to be found. Time-consuming! But worth it.

These two variants, which are based on alternative film posters by graphic artist Liz Lancaster, are a kind of a antithesis to the previous nocturnal covers. Her minimalist design was perfect for a vinyl front sleeve, and all I had to do was apply one of my beloved photo-realistic mockup templates and be done.

I’m ending this blog post with three covers based on various fan posters that I came across in the course of my excessive research on the movie. To be honest, it’s been quite a long time since I last tried my hand in the field of “tribute covers“, but it’s still a hell of a lot of fun!