KEYNOTE ADDRESS: ‘THE AIR ITSELF IS FILLED WITH MONSTERS’: FAME, CIRCULATION, AND UNIVERSAL HORROR
Will Scheibel is associate professor at Syracuse University, where he teaches film and screen studies in the Department of English. His most recent book is titled Gene Tierney: Star of Hollywood’s Home Front (Wayne State University Press, 2022). The subject of this monograph is the actress most famous for playing the title character in the classic film noir Laura (1944), who rose to the ranks of Twentieth Century-Fox’s major stars during World War II and the immediate postwar years — Fox’s head of production Darryl F. Zanuck proclaimed her as “the most beautiful woman in movie history” — before leaving Hollywood to undergo psychiatric treatment in the 1950s. Currently, Will is starting a new book project on the monster movies of Universal Pictures.
‘The Air Itself Is Filled with Monsters’: Fame, Circulation, and Universal Horror: Whether parading down neighborhood blocks on Halloween, advertising candy bars and soft drinks on television commercials, or appearing on T-shirts, tatoos, and totebags, the iconic characters who comprise the “Universal Classic Monsters,” or the UCM, are ubiquitous figures in popular culture. But what explains the ongoing popularity of films such as Dracula (1931), Frankenstein (1931), The Mummy (1932), The Invisible Man (1933), and The Wolf Man (1941)? When and how did the monsters of Universal Pictures become “classics,” and what counts as a “classic” monster, anyway? Undergraduates in film history classes are likely to be already aware of the UCM without even having seen any of the constitutitive films, but there is no guarantee that a contemporaneous film cycle from the Hollywood studio system—say, Busby Berkeley’s backstage musicals for Warner Bros.—would register the same familiarity, despite its own historical popularity. Why do Universal’s monsters remain culturally visible and recognizable as icons? This talk seeks to interrogate these questions by tracking how Universal’s monsters have been used (and to what ends), turning from the films themselves to their afterlives and paratextual progeny.
