Will Scheibel

I'm a Film and Screen Studies professor at Syracuse University, based in the Department of English, and I specialize in popular narrative cinema from the United States. In my research and writing, I often focus on Hollywood stars, styles, genres, and production trends between the 1930s and 1960s, or the “classical” studio period. 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 culture and media 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. This project looks at the canonical formation of what would become known as the Universal Classic Monsters (Dracula, Frankenstein's Monster, The Wolf Man, etc.), from their origins in the serialized films that made Universal Pictures synonymous with the horror genre, to the circulation of Universal horror films on television and home video, to their contemporary status as one of the flagship franchises of a media conglomerate.

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