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In Media Franchising, Derek Johnson argues that the Universal Monster films of the 1930s and 1940s should not be viewed as franchises because âno such discourse was in play to make senseâ of these productions, that to do so âwould be read back onto it an anachronistic cultural logicâ (2013, 51â52). Although Johnson rightly identifies the problems involved in reading media histories through a more contemporaneous lens, it is perhaps more accurate to say that the anachronism is not strictly cultural, but terminological as well, the suggestion being that practices that we would readily associate with franchising today should not be recognized as such, principally because the term had not yet been deployed in that context. Johnsonâs claim, however, that âthe language of franchising would not come to be deployed in even the retail industries until 1959â opens up an additional conundrum: the Universal Studiosâ incarnations of Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, The Invisible Man, etc. have been continually licensed in various forms, both before and after 1959, including comic adaptations, tie-in books and novelizations, confectionary, board games, model-kits, toys, and other objects and apparel. Following Johnsonâs logic, the implication is that the Universal Monsters may in fact be (re)constituted through the concept of franchising after that date, but not before (which would surely be equally anachronistic).1
In contradistinction to Johnson, Matthew Freeman emphasizes that the language of franchising emerged at the turn of the twentieth century in relation to the âphenomenon of transportation sectors utilized exclusively for extending roads, tram lines and railways across the country,â and during the 1920s, âquickly expanded to include food and retail establishments,â including the Coca Cola Company and the Fredericks hair salon (2016, 114â115). By 1930, âthe exploits of a national theatre company were newsworthy for representing âanother step ahead in the production stride toward stage-show entertainmentâ when the company âverified the franchise which includes the development of branches all over Los Angelesââ (121). Freeman argues that âwhile Johnson indicates (perhaps rightly) that âonly after World War II did franchising move to the center of corporate strategyâ (2016, 41â46), the start of the 1930s actually represented the true beginnings of what would now be called media franchisingâ (2016, 121, my italics). While this scavenging for origins is freighted with complicationââtrue beginningsâ are always rooted in antecedent and ancestry, indicating that claims about the discovery and location of a transcendental source is bound to activate an endless chain of genealogical âmomentsâ that pinball throughout the historical recordâit nonetheless seems more than reasonable to categorize the various Universal Monsters film series as franchise properties, as âmultiplication across productions in a single medium or institutional contextâ (Johnson 2013, 45). Although Johnsonâs cautionary note should undoubtedly be heeded, it also runs the risk of establishing a binary between franchising and non-franchising, one that constructs a firm dividing line in our understanding of media histories and instantiations, mostly as a consequence of terminology rather than practice. As Avi Santo emphasizes, âit would be a mistake to think that such concepts do not find their genealogical roots in earlier momentsâ (2015, 10).
Although there is plenty of academic work on the Universal Monsters, especially on Todd Browningâs Dracula (1931) and James Whaleâs Frankenstein (1931)âboth of which can be considered twin pillars of the horror âtalkieââ there does appear to be less sustained interest in the sequels that developed the various properties into commercial franchises. Whereas Whaleâs Bride of Frankenstein (1935) is often viewed as the crown jewel of Universal horror, which in many accounts began in 1931 with the release of Dracula and culminated in 1936 with Lambert Hillyerâs sequel, Draculaâs Daughter, most of the later installments that were produced between 1939 and 1944âwhat I am describing in this chapter as the franchise cycleâhave been largely dismissed as qualitatively inferior products, as cranked out âsoulless spectacles, recycled versions of earlier successesâ (Hitchcock 2007, 198) undergirded by âdwindling budgets,â poor scripts, and diminished box office returns (Friedman and Kavey 2016, 126). As Peter Hutchings argues, âthis negative perception of sequel-heavy 1940s Universal horror is often intertwined with a prejudice against the sequel itself as a particular cinematic format, with the sequelisation process seeming to mark the moment where innovation ends and exploitation beginsâ (2004, 20).
In response, this chapter explores the franchise cycle that, I argue, began with James Whaleâs Bride of Frankenstein and Draculaâs Daughter in 1935 and 1936 respectively, as opposed to identifying Son of Frankenstein as the debut film of a second cycle. Given that this third installment in the Frankenstein series was scheduled to enter production in 1936, after Draculaâs Daughter and before Charles Rogers took over from Carl Laemmle, Jr. as Universalâs head of production and decreed a halt in horror film production. As such, I suggest that this enforced three-year interregnum period did not strictly telegraph the demise of the first horror cycle in that Son of Frankenstein picked up where Draculaâs Daughter left off by continuing and, throughout the early to mid 1940s, accelerating Universalâs novel experiments with transfictional storytelling. As conceptualized by Richard Saint-Gelais, âtwo (or more) texts exhibit a transfictional relationship where they share elements, such as characters, imaginary locations, and fictional worldsâ (Saint-Gelais 2005, 612). Rather than mobilize the concept of intertextuality to explain narrative associations spread across serialized installments, Saint-Gelaisâ transfictionality serves as a clearer way to detail what elements âcountâ as the building blocks to imaginary world construction. Although Universalâs Frankenstein films enter into dialogue with Mary Shelleyâs novel and other intertexts, such as the Hammer franchise films, they do not exist along the same transfictional axis; or, put differently, they are neither compatible nor âcompossibleâ with each other in diegetic terms (the term âcompossibleâ is drawn from Lubomir DoleĹžel [1998]). Following Colin B. Harvey, an adaptationâs primary purpose is to âforget that the story has been told before and present itself as the first telling,â an example of âvertical memory which travels only one wayâ (2015, 91); whereas transfictional storytelling is centered on narrative continuity, or âhorizontal memory,â meaning that each installment should diegetically ârememberâ other installments as a way to construct a narrative sequence or imaginary world. From this perspective, there is no such thing as a singular Frankenstein imaginary world, but rather, an imaginary network, a matrix comprised of multiple transfictional continuities that are often incompatible with one another in terms of story; incompatible narratives that are, on the one hand, always intertextually related to one another along the vertical memory axis, but, on the other, should not be taken as part of a coherent and horizontal transfictional âremembering.â While there have been academic studies on fictional world-building in recent years, these have generally focused on other popular genres such as fantasy and science fiction, whereas horror media seems to be hitherto excluded from the topic of imaginary worlds.
In what follows, I first address the historical and industrial context within which the Universal horror franchises arrived in order to describe, in the broadest terms, the way in which serialization emerged in the nineteenth centuryâin literature, comic strips, magazines, and pulp fictionâto become âan ideal form of narrative under capitalismâ (Hagedorn 1995, 69). I then discuss a few early examples of film series, serials, and sequels to illustrate how these inter-related modes functioned narratively before moving onto the Universal Monster franchise(s). Here, I examine the way that various sequels operate diegetically through transfictional storytelling, seeking to understand the operations of film seriality through the lens of continuity and discontinuity, self-containment and augmentation. Building upon Stuart Hendersonâs concepts of âseries with continuityâ and ââthe series filmâ properâ (2014, 32), I am particularly interested in detailing how the Universal Monster franchises might or might not work as imaginary worlds to explore the idea that, as Lester D. Friedman and Allison B. Kavey argue, âthe Universal film monsters know and interact with each other,â that âthey inhabit the same fictional and timeless universeâ (2016, 105). I conclude this chapter by looking at the monstersâ âafterlivesâ on TV, in comics, tie-in novels, toys, and other franchised expressions.
Series, serials, sequels
Although the complaint that contemporary franchising signifies nothing more than creative bankruptcy, âstudio film production has long featured serial entertainmentsâ (Fleury et al. 2020, 4). It was not cinema, however, that pioneered serial entertainment: audiences were already well-versed âin the consumption of long-form narratives,â and film seriality âmarked less a break from earlier practices than the refinement of a strategy that had been in place in publishing since the 1840sâ (Henderson 2014, 13). As Carolyn Jess-Cooke explains, â[a] major reason for the early practice of film serialization lies in the proliferation of serials in the literary worldâ (2010, 16â17). In this context, cinematic serial entertainment came about as the result of dialogic relationships with emergent and established media platforms of the day: from literature and comic strips to boyâs story papers and fiction magazines to penny dreadfuls (in the UK) and dime novels (in the US), to cheaply printed adventure and science fiction publications (commonly described through the umbrella term âpulp fictionâ). Although serial publication had existed for centuries, it was during the Victorian era that âinstalment fictionâ (Hughes and Lund 2015) became âa product of the first age of mass communicationâ (Altick 1974, 69). In most accounts, it was the part-issue publication of Charles Dickensâ The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, published from March 1836 to November 1837, that precipitated an explosion in serial fiction, an unprecedented phenomenon in the history of literature that also triggered a âglobal culture of serialityâ that became key to the way in which media industries began to operate (Turner 2019, 196).
It is worth noting that Dickens and his contemporaries were not seen as authors of âproperâ literature at the time, but, rather, as immoral dealers in âaddictiveâ storytelling, a âparticularly insidiousâ form of narrative, a âlaudanum-like drugâ that was âdistilled drop by drop in the brainâ (Hayward 1997, 27). As a âproduct of mass manufactureâ, serial fiction was initially âhighly suspectâ (Rose 2011, 92), and it is this commercial aspect that has proved difficult for Dickens with regards to his inclusion in the canon of English literature (John 2010, 18â19). It appears that serialization, in whatever its form, has attracted a lionâs share of critical opprobrium almost since the beginnings of media capitalism, with anxieties related to intellectual impoverishment and commercialization, moral panics and behavioural âeffectsâ being common motifs. Echoing David Bordwell and Robin Woodâs complaints that blockbuster, franchised entertainment of the 1970s and 1980s, as shown in the introduction to this volume, is akin to a virulent pathogen, nineteenth-century literary serials have been discursively framed during the period as a substance addiction.
Although many scholars argue that the heyday of serial publication had more or less faded by the 1860s, the culture of seriality continued apace in other media. Comic strip characters like Richard Outcaultâs The Yellow Kid in the United States (Meyer 2019) and Ally Sloper in Britain (Sabin 2003) became transmedia superstars spread promiscuously across media platforms of the day. The serial lives of both characters were supported by an array of branded merchandise, adaptations, and appropriations, which implies that the practices and principles of contemporary franchising can be mapped back to, at least, the late nineteenth century avant la lettre (pace Freeman 2016 and Johnson 2013).
In cinematic terms, the influence of serialization was felt as early as the turn of the century, a key marker âin the history of the sequel, because it was hugely instructive from a commercial standpointâ (Henderson 2014, 15). Film serials rose in prominence âas a way to present a narrative over more than one filmâ, drawing the use of cliffhangers from serial fiction with âthe intent of keeping audiences coming back for moreâ (Jess-Cooke 2010, 29). According to Jared Gardner, it was comic strips and early comic books that provided much inspiration for burgeoning filmmakers, that âthe newspaper syndicates found audiences increasingly captivated by the threads of continuing narrative, sequential plotting, a...
