Bride of Frankenstein (1935)
The most surprising thing about Bride of Frankenstein is how much heart it has. I turned up expecting a lurching-monster picture, a 1935 horror sequel picking up exactly where the original left off, more of the same gothic atmosphere and pitchfork-wielding villagers. What James Whale actually delivers is something far stranger and more moving than that, and I genuinely did not see it coming.
Because what Whale does, quietly and with considerable boldness, is take the creature and turn him into the protagonist. Boris Karloff, once again extraordinary beneath all that make-up and those bolted-on neck electrodes, plays a being defined entirely by loneliness and incomprehension. He never asked to exist. Nobody wants him around. And yet here he is, blundering through a world that recoils from him at every turn, and you feel every bit of it. That is not what I signed up for when I sat down with a film called Bride of Frankenstein, but it is absolutely what I got, and I am glad for it.
The sequence that really gets under your skin is the creature's friendship with a blind hermit living alone in the woods. Unable to see what everyone else sees, the hermit simply offers companionship and warmth, and the film lets it breathe. It is tender, genuinely touching, and it does more to make you care about this shambling, stitched-together figure than any amount of expository dialogue ever could. Karloff works almost entirely through gesture and those mournful, searching eyes, and he is remarkable. If you loved him in Frankenstein (1931), and I liked that film well enough myself, he is even better here.
Whale brings the same wit and visual confidence he showed in The Invisible Man (1933), which I loved, and there is a playful, almost impish quality to some of the filmmaking that stops the whole thing tipping into po-faced solemnity. The effects are impressive for the era, even if they inevitably show their age now. That is not a criticism so much as an acknowledgment of time passing. The craft is there, and the atmosphere is properly sustained throughout.
My one real gripe is the title, because it sets up an expectation the film has absolutely no intention of meeting. You call something Bride of Frankenstein and I am showing up expecting the Bride to be, you know, in it. And she is, but only barely. The iconic hissing, the extraordinary hair, the electric charge of that final reveal, it is all there, but it amounts to perhaps ten minutes at the very end of the picture. She is a striking cameo rather than a co-lead, and no matter how good those ten minutes are, there is a small but persistent voice in the back of your head asking where she has been for the previous eighty.
It is a minor grumble, though, and it does not change what the rest of the film is. This is a sequel that is cleverer, stranger and more emotionally generous than it has any right to be. It takes a monster and makes him human. It finds genuine warmth in the middle of a gothic horror picture. And in a genre that too often settles for simple scares, it actually has something to say about loneliness, rejection and the cruelty of creating life without accepting responsibility for it. A rare follow-up that arguably outdoes the film that spawned it.
Three and a half stars. A horror classic with a great deal more soul than its monster-movie reputation lets on.
Rating: ★★★½ | Year: 1935 | Watched: 2026-09-01
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
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