Edited May 2016

Preface: Now that I’ve finally decided to go “old” with the blog, I’m doing it in style with not just a regular “old” film, but two, and two that have ripened with age. For this week’s Midnight Screenings, the ’90s, ’80s, ’70s, ’60s, ’50s, and ’40s wouldn’t do. I’m taking it back to two of the granddaddys of filmmaking from the early ’30s, two of the earliest “talkies” and two supreme influences on Midnight Cinema from a time where films could be more openly playful and subversive as filmmakers were still trying to prod and poke at the medium to expose its limits and possibilities.

After the monstrous (I couldn’t resist) success of James Whale’s extremely influential 1931 adaptation of Frankenstein, production on a second film was almost a sure-thing (after all, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the book, had yet to be wholly adapted). As the first film was loved even in its day, one would assume re-creating this formula with slight changes would be sufficient for another success – a sure-thing, in other words. Taking a good, long four years to release it however,  Whale and new screenwriter William Hurlbert had something else in mind. Bride of Frankenstein is less a horror movie than a Gothic playground hopped up on psycho-sexual energy, a carnival of camp and winking terror, a delightful parlor-trick of a film spreading its wings and exploring every nook and cranny of the human condition it can find, and doing so with such a sheer sense of joy it can’t but be contagious. It is a film mirrored by nothing before and, quite possibly, nothing since. Continue reading →