“I am alone, and miserable; man will not associate with me; but one as deformed and horrible as myself would not deny herself to me. My companion must be of the same species, and have the same defects. This being you must create.”
So commands the Creature to his creator Victor Frankenstein in Mary Shelley’s novel. The Creature thinks his suffering can only cease if it is replicated in another, and expresses this desire through possessive, dehumanizing language. His companion must be female because he needs her submissive, and also wretched so she cannot escape to a more rewarding and peaceful life. Victor ultimately doesn’t build this second creature, but the Creature’s wish hangs in the air with a chilling, electrified sense of possibility.
When English director James Whale made a sequel to his 1931 film Frankenstein, it was almost inevitable it would include this second, unrealized resurrection—in Bride of Frankenstein, the Monster (Boris Karloff) flees angry mobs and takes refuge with a blind hermit, eventually demanding alongside the devious Dr. Praetorius (Ernest Thesiger) that Henry Frankenstein (Colin Clive) should build him a mate.
The actor Elsa Lanchester bookends the film, first as Mary Shelley introducing this next chapter to Percy Shelley and Lord Byron, then reappearing as the newly animated Bride in the final scene—bug-eyed, with a black beehive streaked with white, shrieking and unambiguously rejecting her condition. A woman brought back from the dead as the companion of a lonely monster is a perfect Gothic romance, but like a traumatized child or animal in shock, the Bride senses only danger. The Monster changes his mind; he announces, “We belong dead,” and destroys the laboratory with them both inside.
But if Bride of Frankenstein introduced this idea, others would have to flesh it out. With a few minutes on screen and no dialogue, the Bride leaves a lot off the table, something that inspired The Bride! director Maggie Gyllenhaal…
