with Dmetri Kakmi

The Bride of Frankenstein

USA 1935

Director: James Whale

Cast: Boris Karloff, Ernest Thesiger, Elsa Lanchester, Colin Clive

The Bride of Frankenstein is unique in the horror pantheon. Far from being a mere sequel to Whale’s own Frankenstein (1931), it is a beast in its own right. And, like Beatrice to Dante, the ‘monster’s mate’ is Whale’s greatest creation. 

Alongside Hitchcock, James Whale was among the first British auteurs. After working in theatre, he moved to Hollywood and made popular melodramas before turning his hand to horror. Frankenstein (1931), The Old Dark House (1932) and The Invisible Man (1933) followed. But his heart was not in the genre. He wanted A-list prestige projects that would raise his name out of the flea pits to serious cinematic heights. 

Carl Laemmle Jr at Universal Studios had to talk Whale into directing the Bride. Lured back with the promise of a bigger budget and more artistic freedom, Whale exceeded expectations and delivered a sumptuous gothic poem that is neither horror nor entirely a dark comedy, but an idiosyncratic essay that defies classification. Studio heads did not know what to make of it and the censors lost their collective marbles when they saw it, imposing a number of cuts that shortened the running time by fifteen minutes. 

I first encountered the Bride when I was fifteen years old. Pretending to be sick, I stayed home from school to watch it on midday television. The grotesque, freakish images made me see the world anew. It was like being confronted with a new reality and deciding to make your home there. I recognised without being aware of it at the time that the Monster’s plight — a set-upon outcast — was my plight as a gay teenager. The outlook expressed on screen was, explicitly or not, a mordantly gay sensibility that through a series of symbols and situations spoke to those in-tune. 

Next day, struggling to describe the film to friends, I called it ‘a gothic phantasmagoria’.

A principle pleasure is the film’s capacity to slip insurgent ideas into what could have been a standard script. Whale influenced the writing (the prologue and the homunculi, for instance, are his ideas) and was instrumental in casting British actors in the main roles. The comedy is not there to lighten the burden between scenes of terror but rather woven into the overall texture to convey a distinctly English brand of humour that is nothing short of subversive and (nowadays) camp. By the end you feel as if you have been sitting down with Whale himself, having a good old chinwag with a refined man, while Franz Waxman’s virtuoso music underscores peak moments.

Filmed on studio sets in a German Expressionist mode, The Bride of Frankenstein is high on artifice and style. Like The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920), sets are exaggerated, bigger than life, to convey interior states of mind. You can’t imagine a normal human being living in those vast shadow-filled spaces, but you can imagine someone feeling like that. Depending on a character’s mood, a forest can be a bucolic paradise or a stark tableaux of tall straight trunks devoid of branch and leaf. Painted skies glower. Cemeteries almost spew out the dead as gravestones tilt crazily and marble figures loom out of a noxious miasma. 

None of this means anything if it was not for a brilliant cast. We will focus on two pivotal roles.

Ernest Thesiger was one of the great English stage eccentrics. He brings to the role of Doctor Septimus Pretorius (‘There’s no such name,’ mutters Una O’Connor) a customary love of theatrics and aristocratic scorn that is hilarious and menacing. He is the granddaddy of all mad professors, a Mephistophelian figure, there to tempt victims from the straight and narrow. Far from being ‘coded gay’ he is about as out there as an actor dared to be in 1930s Hollywood. Doctor Pretorius is not in the film to merely create a bride for the monster. He is there to bust up a happy heterosexual union as well. And it is hilarious how quickly and eagerly Dr Frankenstein drops his wife-to-be and goes off with a sinister old queen to create ‘unnatural’ life in a lonesome tower. 

But even Thesiger cannot stand up against the mighty Elsa Lanchester. When she is unveiled in the final minutes of the film, her towering figure almost steals the show. She is astonishing as the eponymous bride. (Lanchester in fact portrays two characters. Fey Mary Shelley in the prologue and the uncanny Bride at the end.) Make-up artist Jack Pierce outdoes himself here, creating the most iconic and instantly recognisable female monster in cinema history. Coming across like a bizarre fashion model in minimalist flowing robes and Nefertiti style hair, Lanchester is a sight to behold. All jerky movements and hissing, she is an exaggerated form of womanhood that bespeaks of the drag queen. 

Rumour has it that when he first saw Lanchester in full make up Thesiger said to Colin Clive, ‘We even did her hair. What a couple of queens we are.’ The only give-away the Bride is assembled from cadavers is the jagged scar beneath the chin. It is a pity her screen time is limited because it would be interesting to know what she got up to if she lived. We can surmise from her hostile response to the Monster that she would not countenance compliance or easy domesticity.

The Bride of Frankenstein is of its time, but it is also surprisingly forward looking. First, it foregrounds overtly homosexual characters in a way that won’t be seen until Ryan Murphy’s TV series American Horror Story hits the airwaves in the 2000s. Second, it looks forward to a time when same-sex couples can think about having children through artificial means. Medical advances allow contemporary feminists to contemplate procreation without men. The Bride of Frankenstein, with Ridley Scott’s Alien Covenant (2017), says two can play at that game, and ups the ante by pursuing male procreation, free of women, with a Promethean leap that links ancient myth with present-day sciences.

Dmetri Kakmi is the author of The Dictionary of a Gadfly (as The Sozzled Scribbler), The Door and Other Uncanny Tales, Mother Land, and When We Were Young (as editor). His novel The Woman in the Well will be published in 2025. He is currently working on a crime novel called The Perfect Room.