It’s that time of year again! Time to celebrate the Resurrection with a weeklong plunge into all things zombie! Here’s the history: In 2008, Dr. Girlfriend and I decided to spend a week or so each year marathoning through zombie films that we’d never seen before, and I would blog short reviews. And simple as that, the Easter Zombie Movie Marathon was born.
For the curious, here are links to 2008, 2009 (a bad year), 2010, 2011, 2012 (when we left the blog behind), 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023.
Even before the successful release of Frankenstein, Universal had immediately began development of a sequel and director James Whale reworked the ending to allow for Henry Frankenstein’s survival, but script delays would push the eventual release to 1935. In the meantime, Whale had directed another successful horror film, The Invisible Man, and when producer Carl Laemmie Jr. decided that only Whale could direct the Frankenstein sequel, he signed on. However, he didn’t believe they could top the first film, so Whale decided, according to Mark Vieira’s Hollywood Horror: From Gothic to Cosmic, to make it a “memorable hoot.”
After a number of false starts, Whale and writer John L Balderston decided to focus on an incident from Mary Shelley’s original novel, where the creature demands Frankenstein create a mate for him. In the novel, Frankenstein creates the mate, but destroys it without bringing it to life. This version of the script still didn’t meet Whale’s expectations, so it was passed on to playwright William J. Hurlbut and Edmund Pearson, who finally put together a final script that was then submitted to the Hays office review in November 1934.
Remember how I said Frankenstein was able to be more transgressive because it was made pre-code? Well in 1934 the Hays Code was implemented, and there were now censorship guidelines in place to try a rein in Hollywood’s more outrageous and problematic (to some people) excesses. This meant no more overt God complex outbursts and a pulling back on the number of violent murders take place.
But, as is often the case, working within established limitations allowed for a remarkable amount of covert transgressions to slip through, such as more subtle religious imagery and the now well-documented LGBTQ+ themes and subtexts. James Whale was openly gay and according to some sources, Colin Clive and Ernest Thesiger were bisexual or gay as well.
The only returning cast members were Boris Karloff as the Monster, Clive as Dr. Frankenstein (despite his alcoholism having gotten much worse in the preceding four years), and Dwight Frye as one of Pretorius’ henchmen Karl – no relation to Fritz. Health concerns meant that Mae Clarke’s Elizabeth was recast with Valerie Hobson. Three new characters, though, would steal the spotlight from everyone but Karloff.
Elsa Lanchester was cast in a dual role as both the Bride and, in a prologue that opens the film, Mary Shelley, regaling Percy Shelley and Lord Byron with further tales of Frankenstein’s Monster. Ernest Thesiger plays the delightfully decadent and amoral Dr. Pretorius, who lures Henry back to the lab instead of his wedding bed so the two of them can create non-procreative life! According to James Curtis’s book James Whale: A New World of Gods and Monsters, Whale held up production for ten days in order to cast O. P. Heggie as the blind hermit and the Monster’s only true friend – a role that would resonate so much that Gene Hackman volunteered to cameo as the character in a rare comedy performance for Mel Brooks’ 1974 Young Frankenstein that would become one of the funniest scenes in film history.
Jack Pierce returned to makeup duties, designing the Bride’s iconic robes and lightning-streaked hairdo, and keeping an eye on the Monster’s look, updating it with burns and scars from the previous finale’s fire and making sure that they began healing over the course of the sequel. Kenneth Strickfaden was also back creating and maintaining the unforgettable laboratory equipment.
The Bride of Frankenstein opens at the exact moment Frankenstein ended, with villagers cheering as the windmill collapses in flames. As everyone leaves, taking Henry’s body back to the castle – they think he’s dead – Hans and his wife, the parents of the drowned girl linger because Hans wants to see the Monster’s bones for himself. Unfortunately, he falls into the wreckage where the Monster is lurking. Hans dies, strangled by the Monster, and then his wife is killed and tossed into the wreckage as well.
So the more sympathetic Monster still isn’t really making an appearance yet. Interestingly, according to a Vieria’s above-referenced Hollywood Horror, Whale and Universal’s studio psychiatrist decided “the Monster would have the mental age of a ten-year-old boy and the emotional age of a lad of fifteen.” This would become more apparent as the film progresses and the Monster seems to gain more self-control and develops speech. In fact, the next two people he encounters both survive the experience. A young shepherdess almost drowns in a panic at the sight of the Monster, but he pulls her from the water before being driven away by approaching villagers.
It’s at this point that the Monster is captured and trussed to a pole in a variation of a crucifixion pose, before being carted through the streets and locked in a dungeon. There’s some critical debate about whether this was Whale positioning the Monster as a Christ figure or as an inverted lampoon of the traditional resurrection, where the crucifixion follows the rebirth. Regardless, he doesn’t stay there long, bursting out of his chains and again escaping into the countryside, where he then crosses paths with the blind hermit (Heggie) who befriends him, teaching him to speak, and to enjoy wine and cigars.
I shit thee not.
This is the origin of the now classic “Fire bad!” and “Smoke good!” dialogue that is famous to this day.
While all this is happening, Dr. Septimus Pretorius, another former mentor of Henry’s, arrives at the Frankenstein castle and is immediately the most fabulous thing about the film, taking Frankenstein back to his lab to show him a group of tiny homunculi (a queen, a king, a bishop, a devil, a ballerina, and a mermaid) that he has created (in a scene that would eventually be referenced in Joe Dante’s Piranha, of all places), growing them “like cultures, grew them as nature does, from seed.” Pretorius hasn’t mastered Frankenstein’s approach, so he proposes a team-up, where Henry builds the body of a woman while Pretorius grows her a brain.
I really love the way this film shifts back and forth between horror and science fiction (with a healthy dose of the absurd). Whale wasn’t kidding about making this one more of a hoot, as Pretorius eventually crosses paths with the Monster and recruits him to help pressure Henry into taking part in the plan, showing up at the castle like a goon under Pretorius’ command.
They kidnap Elizabeth and before long we get to our classic conclusion as the Bride is brought to life, only to immediately reject the Monster and cling to Henry for protection, whereupon the Monster becomes one of cinema’s first incels, declaring he, Pretorius, and the Bride “belong dead” before, with a tear in his eye, blowing them all up in a massive explosion, leaving only Henry and Elizabeth alive in the end.
It’s a tragic and downbeat ending, highlighted by the reveal of Lanchester’s Bride. Also according to Vieira’s book, Lanchester modeled the Bride’s iconic movements and screeches on the hissing of swans, giving the scene an even more otherworldly feel. She truly feels like she doesn’t quite know how to be human at that point. It’s amazing that with only a few minutes of actual screen time, Lanchester’s Bride immediately became a pop culture fixation with her Nefertiti-inspired hairdo and haunting screams.
Bride of Frankenstein is truly deserving of all the praise it has garnered over the past century, from the immediate reviews of the day in Variety and Time, to its inclusion in the United States National Film Registry, deemed “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant,” to consistently topping various Greatest Movies and/or Greatest Sequels lists from Empire magazine to the Boston Herald and Entertainment Weekly. It’s easily one of my favorite films of all time and is definitely one of the greatest sequels ever made, surpassing the original in my opinion.