John Kobal Foundation/Moviepix/Getty ImagesOver the past few years, a surprising number of filmmakers have seemingly said to themselves, “you know what this world needs? A fresh take on Frankenstein.” The latest incarnation of this wave began with Poor Things back in 2023, with Lisa Frankenstein, Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, and now Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! following in quick succession. But where The Bride! “wants so desperately to be novel and provocative that it forgets to offer anything of substance,” as Inverse’s Hoai-Tran Bui writes, the original revisionist Frankenstein film smuggled complex ideas about gender and sexuality into a cash-grab sequel whose director had to be talked into taking the job.A WWI veteran who got his start in the theater, James Whale’s career in Hollywood really took off when his adaptation of Frankenstein became a hit for Universal Pictures in the fall of 1931. In the years that followed, he alternated between horror films and more straightforward dramas and rom-coms; early in his career, Whale had directed multiple projects about “The Great War,” and he was worried about being pigeonholed again, this time as a “horror director.” And so Whale turned down Universal’s initial offer for a Frankenstein sequel, saying that the script “[stunk] to high heaven” and that he’d “squeezed the idea dry” on the first film.Several drafts and promises of future (non-horror) work from the studio later, Whale finally agreed, and production on The Bride of Frankenstein began on January 2, 1935. Drawing from a subplot in Mary Shelley’s original where the Monster asks Dr. Frankenstein to make him a companion — a task the doctor begins, but never completes, in the novel — The Bride of Frankenstein focuses on the relationship between Henry Frankenstein (Colin Clive) and his mentor Doctor Pretorius (Ernest Thesinger), with Henry’s fianceé (now wife) Elizabeth (Valerie Hobson) mostly there to provide a wholesome, or at least human, counterpoint to the Monster’s grotesque-yet-glamorous Bride.Whale’s homosexuality was an “open secret” in Hollywood in the 1930s, but in the years between Frankenstein and The Bride of Frankenstein, the infamous Hays Code banned any portrayals of sexuality — especially homosexuality — in American film for the next three decades. And so the queer coding in The Bride of Frankenstein is covert, if not especially subtle: Henry and Dr. Pretorius spending their nights in the laboratory trying to create new life while the younger doctor’s pretty wife sits alone in her bedroom, for example.Savvy audiences in the 1930s would have picked up on Pretorius’ flamboyant mannerisms as easily as modern ones, and the lonely life of the Monster (Boris Karloff), who’s feared and rejected for the crime of being different, takes on a heartbreaking melancholy when it’s compared to the struggles of queer people in early-20th century America. Queer horror in general places great emphasis on identifying with the villain, and Karloff’s creation is the most sympathetic of all of Universal's monsters.Much has been made of the fact that Elsa Lanchester only has about five minutes of screen time as the titular Bride, but the British actress makes the absolute most of her abbreviated screen time. Her look is iconic: The tower of black hair with the shocking streak of white, her arms wrapped in bandages and her eye makeup completely on point. But it’s Lanchester’s performance that really makes the Bride memorable. Her eyes are wide and panicked, and she cranes her neck and jerks her head with movements she learned by observing swans at the park.And although it was invented for the movie, the ending of The Bride of Frankenstein is very much in the feminist spirit of Shelley’s original novel. Mary Shelley was the daughter of a famous feminist, and in Frankenstein she notes the irony of Frankenstein trying to create life through science while simultaneously sidelining and silencing the women in his life. Brought back without her consent to be the companion of a man she did not choose, The Bride is an example of a woman whose bodily autonomy is hijacked by men who see her as little more than a means to an end. (It’s always ironic when you see art depicting Frankenstein and his Bride as a happy couple.) And although he’s sympathetic in other ways, the Monster becomes enraged and burns down Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory when the Bride rejects him. He’s an undead version of the “nice guys” who react violently when women don’t give them the affection they feel they deserve. It’s no wonder that she wakes up screaming.The Bride of Frankenstein is now streaming on HBO Max.