9 - Universal Horror and Universal Weekly: The Visible Invisibility of the Invisible Man

Summary

Film magazines have played a significant role in constituting the history of film culture in the twentieth century and have been crucial in the enhancement of the audiences’ affective engagement with cinema. As demonstrated by the existing scholarship as well as the other chapters in this edited collection, stars have been a highly visible part of these movie magazines, including the film ads that appear in them. The association of the audiences with the stars is dependent on the latter's clarity and discernability, that is, they must be ‘seen’. But how do movie magazines engage with the representation of a star/character whose defining characteristic is invisibility? In this chapter, I look at the figure of the Invisible Man, the protagonist in Universal's 1933 monster film The Invisible Man (Whale), as it appeared in the pages of Universal's house organ Universal Weekly. Since the publicity machinery in the 1930s was dependent on the print medium, inevitably predicated on the visible, I look at the ways in which Universal publicity executives negotiated the problems encountered while trying to advertise a film that had a central character who was invisible.

The Invisible Man: A Visibly Different Horror

A simple keyword search on Project Arclight throws up a very interesting set of statistics. The resulting graph shows that during the period 1930–1936, there is a gradual spike in the usage of the word ‘horror’ in the printed paratextual literature on American popular cinema. The word ‘monster’ also follows a similar pattern and increases during this period. It is not just a coincidence that Universal Studios had a very successful run of a series of horror films that started with Dracula (Browning 1931) and ended with Dracula's Daughter (Hillyer 1936). Although Universal was not in the league of the ‘Big Five’ studios, its success during the 1930s was due to its veritable monopoly on the horror film market. A careful examination of film magazines and journals during the period 1930–1936 shows that popular print was replete with images of monsters such as Dracula, Frankenstein's Monster, the Mummy and others.