Frankenstein’s monster is always in the news, from Guillermo del Toro’s latest Hollywood hit to the Hotel Transylvania series. Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel was the first to tell the story of the creature, but a 1931 movie version of the story is what most people think of when they think of the creature. This movie is considered one of the first in the modern horror genre.
James Whale, who directed Frankenstein, made a sequel called Bride of Frankenstein in 1935. A new movie written and directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal is bringing the focus back to the monster’s wife almost a hundred years later. The movie is appropriately called The Bride!
The Bride! takes place in Chicago in the 1930s and imagines what would happen if the title character were made, which happens in the last scenes of the 1935 movie. In Gyllenhaal’s version of the story, Frank (Christian Bale) and the Bride (Jessie Buckley) become partners in crime and life, which leads to major social change.
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Gyllenhaal told Entertainment Weekly in 2025 that she wanted to watch Bride of Frankenstein after seeing a tattoo of the main character. The actress and director were surprised by what the movie was about.
Gyllenhaal told Entertainment Weekly that The Bride “is only in it for five minutes at most.” “She’s still strong, but I thought there was something wrong with this idea.” People call it the Bride of Frankenstein, but it’s really Frankenstein. So, who is she?
The original movie didn’t do a good job of fleshing out the Bride, but it did set the stage for horror films today. Universal Pictures wanted to make a sequel to the 1931 movie Frankenstein after it became a huge hit at the box office. The only problem the studio had was that Whale didn’t want to make it.
Who was James Whale?
Whale was born in England in 1889. Before World War I, he studied visual arts and then joined the British Army. The Germans took him prisoner, but he got better at telling stories by putting on shows at a prisoner-of-war camp. Whale worked in London’s theatre scene for ten years after the war. Then he moved to the US to direct a Broadway production of Journey’s End, a play about British officers in the trenches on the Western Front. He directed the 1930 movie version of Journey’s End, but then he changed his mind to avoid being typecast.
James Whale (right) and Boris Karloff (left) on the set of Bride of Frankenstein
Boris Karloff is on the left and James Whale is on the right. The photo is in the public domain and can be found on Wikimedia Commons.
James Curtis, who wrote James Whale: A New World of Gods and Monsters, says, “Up to the time he got Frankenstein, he was thought to be an expert on the Great War.” “He knew a lot about it, so he wanted to grow his business beyond that.”
Whale directed Frankenstein to great success on stage by using his skills as an artist and the tricks he learned for keeping audiences interested while working in live theatre. Curtis says that the scary parts of the movie, like when the monster comes to life and when he accidentally drowns a young girl, were “shocking at that time.”
People loved Frankenstein.
Curtis says, “It’s like how people are drawn to car accidents.” “We have a natural need to see and think about that kind of thing.”
It’s Alive! A Scene from Frankenstein (1931) on YouTube Logo
Whale directed a number of films from 1932 to 1935 that were in a variety of genres, such as horror films, the sci-fi classic The Invisible Man, and even a romantic comedy. Curtis says that Universal thought it was “pretty much a given” that the director would soon make a sequel to Frankenstein. But Whale said he had “squeezed the idea dry” on the first picture.
Whale thought about leaving Universal, but in the end he worked out a deal with the studio: he could direct one movie of his choice for every horror movie he made. And so Bride of Frankenstein, which was first called The Return of Frankenstein, was born.
How Bride of Frankenstein was made
Many screenwriters worked on the script for the sequel before Whale finally agreed to move on to the next step in making the movie. The movie shows Septimus Pretorius, who used to be the mentor of the monster’s creator, Henry Frankenstein, plotting to make a mate for the monster. Henry is forced to help Septimus because he is working with the monster. In Shelley’s book, the scientist Victor Frankenstein agrees to make a female partner for the monster, but he changes his mind and destroys his unfinished creation. At the same time, the monster grows as a person, learning to talk and making friends with an old, blind hermit.
Bride of Frankenstein (1/10) Movie CLIP: Pretorius Shows Henry His Experiment (1935) HDWatch on YouTube Logo
Frances Pheasant-Kelly, a film studies professor at the University of Wolverhampton in England, says, “In Bride of Frankenstein, we feel sorry for the monster a lot, especially as it learns to speak.”
Whale brought back Colin Clive as Henry and Boris Karloff as the monster for the sequel. The director had full creative control over everything, from the music to the casting to the Bride’s now-famous hairdo.
Did you know? The designer who made the Bride’s famous look
- The Bride’s simple white dress was made by Vera West, who is in charge of Universal Pictures’ costume department.
- White made costumes for almost 400 films, such as Phantom of the Opera (1943) and The Killers (1946), which was Ava Gardner’s big break.
Curtis says, “Whale thought he had done all the hard work with the first movie and gotten the idea out of the way.” “So he was going to take it to a whole new level, and a lot of it was going to be funny.” The monster was going to talk like he did in the story. At the same time, he wanted it to be scary in some parts. He wanted it to be a lot of fun. He wanted it to go quickly. It has a more advanced style than the first movie.”
Some scholars, like Pheasant-Kelly, think that Bride of Frankenstein hints at Whale’s identity as a gay man. People often say that he was the first openly gay director in Hollywood. He was in a relationship with producer David Lewis for more than 20 years.
Curtis disagrees, saying that Whale didn’t like to mix his work and personal life.
Curtis says, “He was a very private person.” “He was honest about being gay, but he also thought it wasn’t anyone’s business.”
Bride of Frankenstein stars Elsa Lanchester and Boris Karloff.
Bride of Frankenstein with Elsa Lanchester and Boris Karloff Bettmann via Getty Images
Pheasant-Kelly says that modern viewers have called Pretorius queer-coded in particular. The scholar says, “Another character describes Pretorius as a very queer-looking gentleman, and there are some campy mannerisms in his characterisation.” “But there are also two men making life in the lab.” Those are the two most important signs of that strange subtext, which may be a reflection of James Whale’s personal life.
People have also said that Ernest Thesiger, who played Pretorius in Bride of Frankenstein, was openly gay or bisexual. Pheasant-Kelly says that Whale’s view of Pretorius might be shown by the fact that he dies in an explosion in the movie.
She says, “It’s interesting—killing off the queer character.” “I don’t know if Whale thought about it that way to please the censors, but it was interesting.”
The Hays Code and censorship
Pheasant-Kelly’s research on Bride of Frankenstein looks at censorship. After the Hays Code was put in place in 1934, directors were very concerned about censorship. The Hays Code was a set of moral rules for films that Hollywood studios had to follow. Censors had to look over the final scripts and cuts of films to make sure they didn’t have any bad language, sexual content, or graphic violence. The Hays Code lasted until 1968, when the Motion Picture Association of America switched to the rating system that is still used today.
Whale’s 1935 sequel couldn’t be as gruesome as the first Frankenstein. Censors took out any mention of God, especially those that compared the making of Frankenstein’s monster to the making of life by God. They also cut out any scenes that showed too much of the Bride or Henry’s wife, Elizabeth.
Curtis says that even with these cuts, Bride of Frankenstein had “interesting and morbid nuances.”
He says, “A lot of things that happened back then were by inference, and smart audiences knew what the filmmakers were getting at.” “But they weren’t as obvious about it as they might have been in 1931 or ’32.”
Richard Rothwell painted this oil on canvas of Mary Shelley around 1840.
Richard Rothwell painted this portrait of Mary Shelley in oil on canvas around 1840. It is in the public domain and can be found on Wikimedia Commons.
Pheasant-Kelly says that some of Whale’s early creative decisions were made with censors in mind. For example, he included a prologue in which an actress playing Mary Shelley says that the story is a product of her imagination.
Pheasant-Kelley says that the prologue “calms the censors’ nerves because it makes them think it was a fantasy.” “The way he got around some of the horror was to make it seem like it couldn’t happen.”
The prologue also talked about Whale’s choice to cast Elsa Lanchester as both the Bride and Shelley. Lanchester once said:
James thought that both men and women who were pretty and nice on the outside were very bad on the inside. Bad thoughts. These thoughts could be about dragons. They might be about monsters. They could be from Frankenstein’s lab. James wanted the same actress to play both parts to show that the Bride of Frankenstein really did come from Mary Shelley’s heart.
In Gyllenhaal’s The Bride!, the same actress plays both Shelley and the Bride again. Buckley, who was nominated for an Oscar for Best Actress for her role in Hamnet, plays Shelley.
The Bride! with Christian Bale and Jessie Buckley!Christian Bale and Jessie Buckley star in The Bride! Thanks to Warner Bros. Photos
The legacy of Bride of Frankenstein
People loved Bride of Frankenstein. The movie made $2 million by 1943 (about $37.5 million today) and got good reviews. Pheasant-Kelley says that even though it has inspired fewer remakes than the first one, details like the Bride’s hair and the idea of a mad scientist keeping his creations in small jars are still important in the film industry today.
She says, “It’s still a very important movie, an iconic movie, in the history of horror.” “It always comes up, and there are so many references to it.”
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Both Pheasant-Kelley and Curtis say that Whale’s work on Bride of Frankenstein was some of his best. Curtis says that the two Frankenstein films made people feel sorry for the monster, especially after Bride of Frankenstein gave him more personality.
