“I hope her bones are firm..”
I know, I know, an obvious choice, but seriously guys: in much the same way that I spent about ten years stubbornly refusing to listen to The Beatles, I only got around to actually watching this a few months ago, and what can I tell you: it knocked my block off. What a movie!
Ok, so the opening fifteen minutes or so – in which Mary Shelley refers to her husband as “Shelley, dear” and Baron Frankenstein cuddles up with his bride-to-be wondering how he ever got involved with all that god-challenging evilness in the first movie - is sorta inexplicably terrible. But as soon as Dr. Pretorious is on the scene, well… I’ve rarely seen a film that turns on a dime so suddenly and just fuckin’ goes for it with such furious vigour.
It’s all so, so… VIVID, y’know – the absolute antithesis of the kind of slow-moving, stagey filmmaking we tend to associate with the 1930s - barely a minute is allowed to pass without our senses being bombarded with something utterly grotesque and incredible. Seventy-five years of cumulative influence and analysis have served to give films such as “Bride of Frankenstein” a sort of ‘high art’ aura, as our attention is drawn to the German Expressionist influence, to the weighty themes and sub-texts and yadda yadda yadda. And that’s all well and good, but really I think that “Bride..” can be better viewed as one of the all-time triumphs of LOW art – pulp in excelsis! Full of booze and cigars and crazy, craggy faces and desperation and rage and confusion and ecstasy, this is two-fisted gothic madness of the highest order, a film that doesn’t so much hint at the more twisted and disturbing aspects of its plotline as throw them in your face and insist you wrestle them to the ground.
Whatever else may or may not have been on James Whale’s mind, his main motivations here were to titillate us, repulse us, excite us, and generally keep us glued to our seats with crazed, barbaric imagery and ghoulish, transgressive notions, fired at us more quickly than we can really process them. Even today, “Bride..” makes for startling, violent and fast-moving viewing – in 1935 it must have been nothing short of mindblowing! I mean, first of all Pretorious is gulping down straight gin, showing us these fucked up little people he keeps in bottles, telling us he “grew them from seed”, then we’ve got poor old Karloff stomping around like a hunted beast, absent-mindedly caving people’s heads in and hurling old ladies down mineshafts, and then the film is asking us to imagine what would happen to the human race if a man-made creature constructed out of sewn together corpse-parts was to mate with his female counterpart to produce living offspring, and… oh my god “Bride of Frankenstein”, slow down, you’re freaking me out!
And of course, the lightning rod for all this weirdness is Dr. Pretorius himself - surely one of the most fascinating and ambiguous characters in all of horror cinema. Not quite a villain, not quite a tragic mad scientist, he’s utterly inexplicable – a genial avatar of amoral, Luciferian anarchy, parachuted into the movie to take charge and ride the fucker to masterpiece status, reducing Frankenstein himself to the status of an irritating, priggish sidekick. Who WAS this guy? Where did he come from? Where did he GO? Merrily gallivanting back into the horror sub-conscious, a figure so dangerous no one’s ever quite dared to call upon him again, no matter how many thousands of subsequent mad scientists and cult leaders have ripped a chunk out of Ernest Thesiger’s definitive performance.
What more can I possibly tell you? You’ve seen it, you know. I know I talked in the “Black Cat” write-up about the genesis of the ‘weirdo horror film’ – well it’s rare that anyone has managed to top this one.
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