The Bride of Frankenstein Casts An Empathetic Light On Monsters

Much like Christopher Nolan established his take on Batman with Batman Begins before really cutting loose as a filmmaker with the sequel, The Dark Knight, director James Whale took his time defining his own take on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein mythos before going nuts with a sequel. In this case, the follow-up was The Bride of Frankenstein, a film that went bigger in every way than its predecessor. His ambitious sequel went weirder, more comedic, and also more tragic in terms of depicting the loneliness of Frankenstein's beast. We've gotten a lot of Frankenstein movies over the years but this level of creative audacity puts it above even top-tier Frankenstein cinema like I, Frankenstein.


Taking place shortly after the first movie ended, a mob of townspeople thinks they've done away with The Monster (Boris Karloff) after burning up a windmill he was residing in. Turns out The Monster is far from dead. Emerging from the wreckage of the windmill, The Monster disposes of a handful of townsfolk lingering around the ashes of the windmill before heading off into the countryside. Meanwhile, Henry Frankenstein (Collin Clive) is pressured by a fellow scientist named Doctor Pretorious (Ernest Thesiger) to continue his work in the art of creating life. Henry won't hear of it but as The Monster's loneliness increases, Henry may not have a choice. Soon he will be forced to create the titular creation for his original beast.

If there's a scene from The Bride of Frankenstein that really stuck in my mind afterwards is the stretch of the movie dedicated to The Monster stumbling onto a cabin occupied by a blind old man (O.P. Heggie). Because this fellow cannot see the appearance of The Monster, he's the one person in the world who does not immediately recoil away from him. In fact, being another person whose unorthodox appearance made him isolated from general society, he sympathizes with The Monster. The two proceed to bond and this elderly man even teaches The Monster how to speak, how to smoke cigars and the value of human connection.

These warmly empathetic sequences show the kind of love for monsters that would come to define the careers of filmmakers like Guillermo del Toro. The Monster could have just been another towering killing machine but in the hands of director James Whale, he becomes something much more interesting. In The Bride of Frankenstein, he's explicitly rendered as a tragic figure ostracized simply for being himself. There's something deeply relatable in that concept. The mournful ending for The Monster's friendship (some villagers just burst in and destroy the hut that the old blind man was living in) just when things seemed perfect reinforces how people judged as "different" face ongoing struggles even during seemingly happy times.

Alongside these thoughtful explorations of societal outcasts, William Hurlbut's screenplay does a lot of unabashedly weird scenes that I found downright delightful. Take the scene where Doctor Pretorious establishes his science bona fidas. As one does, he pulls out jars containing tiny humans that occupy titles like King, Queen and so on. The Bride of Frankenstein has multiple scenes with visuals containing an unnerving atmosphere but it also utilizes the inherently heightened premise of Frankenstein as an excuse to embrace some truly wacky comedy. This willingness to embrace the absurd is especially a boon for Ernest Thesiger's performance, which is so unabashedly campy, it's wonderful.

These alterations between the tragic and the comedic lead up to a pitch-perfect ending where we finally meet our titular character (portrayed by Elsa Lanchester), who recoils in horror upon first seeing The Monster. Afterwards, The Monster simply and solemnly intones "She hate me." Through those three words, you can see his entire spirit crushed. It's a moment that echoes the ending of the original King Kong, where a movie uses restrained methods of conjuring up so much empathetic emotion for a "monster". If the history of cinema has taught us anything, it's that within monsters we can find deeply human emotions and The Bride of Frankenstein certainly accomplishes that in its further exploration of Frankenstein's creations.