Hallo-Franken-Watch: The Bride of Frankenstein (1935)

Watched:  10/30/2025

Format:  4K

Viewing:  Unknown

Director:  James Whale

What's not to like in Bride of Frankenstein (1935)?

Yes, if you come in expecting to be genuinely scared, that won't happen.  If you want to see something weird, uncanny, funny, touching, cheer-worthy, wildly subversive and camp (a word we throw around a lot but don't correctly use), Bride is your movie.  

This movie is about so many things.  

Rather than have someone directly speak to the audience in this installment, we recreate the Percy and Mary Shelley (nee Godwin) and Lord Byron conversations that famously spawned Frankenstein.  Mary Shelley is posed as the one explaining the hubris of what we're to see, as the scene echoes what will come later with Dr.'s Frankenstein and Pretorious.  

But again, that's cover.  This film picks up the thread in the book that the creature realizes he'll be alone and asks/ forces Frankenstein to build him a mate as he feels he's damned to walk the world alone forever.  

The film, instead, introduces the wacky/ evil Dr. Pretorious, a corrupt man of medicine who is like a funhouse version of Henry Frankenstein - who didn't succeed in the same way, but has made tiny people-like beings he grew "from seed".  The perversity of what they're up to is not rationalized, it's embraced.  

Readings of the subtext in the scenes with Henry and Pretorious vary, and they're all wildly legitimate.  You read into the scene what you want.  It's certainly blasphemous, it's queer-coded on some level, it's like showing an addict their favorite drug.  

The monster also plays out a version of the scene from the book with the blind man, suggesting a holiness in kindness and understanding of the outsider.  

Before the monster ever gets involved, Pretorious and Frankenstein decide to build a woman, and it's a curiously modern throughline of the movie.  The book never gives us a bride, so the arrival of the Bride and her utter rejection of the being they thought they were making her for, as well as not liking the two doctors much either, can be read as simply a feral animal, a rejection of the horror of the monster - but I prefer the notion that it's kind of nuts to build a woman and expect her to care why you built her, she owes you nothing and can have what she wants, and that doesn't need to be the big, flat-headed weirdo grabbing at her.

"How come I didn't get a sequel?"

Visually, the movie is a leg-up on it's predecessor.  Whale knows that birth scene is the money-maker, so he buries it in the last ten minutes of the movie.  And, yeah, it works here, too.  The lab is shot beautifully, as is the experiment.  By 1935 the audio-quality is already leaps and bounds improved, and lenses and cameras all seem to provide a richer picture.

But, mostly, this movie is such a delight in every scene.  When I hear the kids say that movies can't just change tone from scene to scene, I want to ask someone to hold-Dr.-Pretorius'-gin, because we're gonna pivot three times in a scene, if we feel like it here in 1935.  

One Halloween I'll watch this movie first so I spend the proper amount of time writing it up.  It's just the best.