The Last Warning: Uncertainty, Exploitation, and Horror

Abstract

This chapter considers Universal’s relationship with its audiences at the end of the silent period of Hollywood cinema. Specifically, it presents The Last Warning as a case study and focuses on the ways that Universal promoted this film—a “partial-talkie”—to exhibitors and advertised it to the public. This analysis suggests how Universal imagined the audience for this film and explores the studio’s strategies for connecting the film’s narrative to this imagined audience during the transitional period to synchronised sound. For example, Universal tried to entice exhibitors to book the film by providing survey cards that audience members could fill out during a break in the film’s narrative. The cards would allow them to guess “whodunnit” before the film resumed. Universal therefore engaged in a creative and playful approach to making the film experience more interactive, albeit in a decidedly low-tech way. The studio imagined a specific, rather sophisticated type of audience engagement with a stylistically creative but narratively banal genre film at the end of the silent era.