Director: James Whale
Cast: Boris Karloff, Colin Clive, Ernest Thesiger, Elsa Lancaster
Have I Seen it Before: Many, many times. My earliest memory of the film ties directly to a Universal Monsters coloring book released in the 1990s. At this point, I just need to find another copy of that thing, right? Beyond that, I plum wore out a VHS recording from Turner Classic Movies. One of the more purely delightful moviegoing experiences in my life was going to a library-hosted* screening of the film in the early 00s**. When I first joined Beyond the Cabin in the Woods, this was my first choice for a movie for the polterguides to watch. The idea that it has taken this long to re-watch the film since starting these reviews in 2018 is kind of flabbergasting, but after watching <Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948)> for my guest spot on Horror Hangover, I just couldn’t help myself.
Yes. Yes, I have seen Bride of Frankenstein before.
Did I Like It: There’s isn’t much more I can do to tip my hand after that previous section and its myriad footnotes. Bride is the greatest of the Universal Monster movies, is in my top 10 films of all time, and may just edge out Halloween (1978) as my favorite horror movie of all time***.
It is weird. It is funny far more often than it has any right to be. Every character, from Mary Shelley (Lancaster) in he film’s prologue, all the way to the Bride’s (Lancaster, again) arrival in the finale—is more interesting and vibrant than the one who appeared just before. The film is heartbreaking and often filled with a perfectly packaged, unrelenting sense of dread.
And it accomplishes all of this in the span of 75 minutes. If a measure of cinematic efficiency—with pleasures-over-runtime being the metric—is at all a fair judge of film, then this is the single most efficient feature film ever made.
If you haven’t seen this movie before, you must stop everything you are doing and watch it now. If it’s been a while, you need to drop everything and be reminded how truly good it is. If you’ve watched it recently, there is no harm in giving it another go, just as a treat.
*It’s honestly at the core of a lot of the work I’m trying to do at the moment, now that I’m thinking about it.
**It had been a date, no less. Needless to say, things didn’t work out. The films of James Whale may not be the opening romantic salvo that I always thought they should be, but I’m blessed to have ended up with someone who at least tolerates the Universal Monsters.
***Such rankings are arbitrary. At any given moment, this movie or Halloween is superior. They both rank, and very likely may be equal in their superlative quality.