Before Rob Zombie‘s feature directorial debut House of 1000 Corpses was saved by Lionsgate, Universal Pictures had financed the film that introduced horror fans to the Firefly family.

Zombie had promoted the hell out of the film, which would be held captive at Universal for quite some time. I recall Zombie even selling really cool must-own shirts at his concerts where he would play the trailer on the stage’s giant screen. It was quite literally torture waiting for its eventual release.

Even though Universal would get cold feet, they did start the process of creating marketing assets for the release. Obviously, we got a trailer, but there was also an awesome poster in the works. Zombie shares today alleged never-before-seen (as far as I can tell) concept art for the film’s official one-sheet, which rocks some wicked design work that we’ve seen in a lot of Zombie’s concepts shared over the years.

Interestingly, it features the late Matthew McGrory as Tiny holding a woman in his arms…even though he was not the film’s star. The kicker: the Universal Pictures logo is on the bottom. I love seeing unreleased goodies and hope that Zombie finds a way to properly release this as a poster or even shirt design.