Universal Horror And Universal Weekly : the Visible Invisibility of the Invisible Man

This chapter examines advertisements for The Invisible Man (James Whale, 1933) in both fan magazines and trade journals. Usually black-and-white prints, often spread across two adjacent pages of the magazine, these advertisements are particularly interesting because Universal focused on the spectral corporeality of the Invisible Man and made the problem of representing this invisibility its publicity theme.Universal claimed that while the question of representing the Invisible Man on film was resolved, its representation in print, especially advertisements in magazines, was still open-ended. Formulated along a minimalist aesthetic and through the use of shadows, silhouettes, and white spaces that highlighted absent presence to represent the invisible monster, their advertisements were predicated on the formlessness of the Invisible Man, thus differentiating him from earlier Universal monsters like Frankenstein’s Monster, Dracula, and the Mummy, which all had a well-defined physical appearance. The chapter argues that the idea of the new monster’s corporeality existing outside the boundaries of the physical world was also about defying the familiar ways of conceptualizing and categorizing a monster. This crisis of representation was a theme that Universal seized, and created an entire publicity campaign around.