A Film Canon

 

 

Bride Of Frankenstein represents the apotheosis of the 1930s Universal Horror cycle, clarifying its pervasive focus on the 'return of the repressed' as a return to the natural, asexual and contemporaneous - in a word, the everyday - by way of its opposite. This finds clearest expression in the pervasive naturalisation of the 'monstrous', most explicitly in the form of the monster himself, who, cast out into the woods and forced (or allowed) to acquire a modicum of linguistic and sympathetic literacy, becomes something of a noble savage, an embodiment of the state of nature. In this light, it may be that the monster's most crucial friendship is not with his 'bride' - who, in order to keep up with this naturalisation, is composed of live, rather than dead, tissue - but the hermit that he encounters in the heart of the forest, whose blindness and fragility present him with a bodily disorientation comparable to his own. Ironically, this naturalisation of the monster brings the film much closer to the spirit of Shelley's novel - and, specifically, its interrogation of the human - than the original, lending some credence to an otherwise ridiculous prologue in which she promises to tell her brother and Lord Byron 'what happened next'. Not only does the monster confront his own reflection, but both Frankenstein and his fiancee come sufficiently close to death to warrant the familiar exclamation "He's/She's alive!", while the final scene construes man and monster as mere co-habitants of an electro-organic medium. The latter is aided by a more idiosyncratic directorial vision than occurs in Whale's previous work, in which diagonal sight-lines and assymetrical compositions create a steady, upward gaze that exploits Shelley's identification of the monster with Christ to effect a return to 'normal' religion, or orthodoxy.