Will Scheibel

I'm a film and screen studies professor who specializes in popular narrative cinema from the United States. In my critical writing, I often focus on Hollywood stars, styles, genres, and production trends between the 1930s and 1960s, or the “classical” studio period. One of my central research questions asks, what can iconic or legendary figures in U.S. film history tell us about the cultural contexts in which they were made legible? For example, my monograph Gene Tierney: Star of Hollywood’s Home Front (Wayne State University Press, 2022) is about 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. Other books have come out of my secondary interest in popular media and culture more generally. With Julie Grossman, I co-wrote the “TV Milestones” volume Twin Peaks (Wayne State University Press, 2020) and co-edited the collection Penny Dreadful and Adaptation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). I am also a staff writer for Film Obsessive.

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Currently, I am beginning a new book titled Monsters in the Movie Lab: Horror, Seriality, and Universal Pictures. For this project, I am researching the formation of what would become known as the "Universal Classic Monsters" (Dracula, Frankenstein's Monster, The Wolf Man, etc.), from a brand identity in the studio system based in genre and stardom, to a fan phenomenon in the era of television and home video, to a contemporary entertainment franchise.

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