From “The Bride! Is the Latest Example of a New Wave of Feminist Horror,” a Variety piece by Kennedy French, posted on 3.6.26:
“When Maggie Gyllenhaal sat down to rewatch The Bride of Frankenstein, the 1935 James Whale classic, she wasn’t prepared for what she didn’t see. The Bride appears for only two minutes. She says nothing. She looks at the creature she was built to love, screams once and is blown up. She was made for a man who disgusted her, in a world that gave her no say in the matter. And then she was gone.
“’She finds herself in such an insane situation,’ Gyllenhaal said in a press conference promoting the film. ‘Having been brought back from the dead without her consent to be the wife of someone that she’s never met.’ That absence — a character conjured into existence, denied everything and eliminated — fueled The Bride!, her new film starring Jessie Buckley and Christian Bale.
“The film’s ambition, in Gyllenhaal’s words, is sweeping: ‘A celebration of all of the parts of all of us that will not fit into the box that we’ve been told we need to fit into.'”
HE reply: Gyllenhaal and French are imagining things. Boris Karloff‘s monster doesn’t want Lanchester to become his bride or satisfy him sexually…not at all. He’s simply looking for gentle friendship — the same kind of humanitarian caring that the old man in the forest offered him…a warm fire, soup, wine, bread, a cigar. Karloff doesn’t paw or stroke or even caress Lanchester. He certainly doesn’t try to use or dominate her sexually. He simply holds her hand and whimpers “friend?…friend?”