"It's an old cliché that a sequel is never as good as the original." "But director James Whale set that on its head with Bride of Frankenstein, the crowning achievement of Universal's golden age of horror." "Never had a studio lavished so much production value and acting talent on a so-called monster movie." "Bride of Frankenstein transcended its genre and remains one of Universal's best-loved films." "For Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, the attempted creation of the monster's bride was always part of her original vision." "How James Whale and Universal Pictures played matchmaker for Boris Karloff and Elsa Lanchester is quite a story." "And, like a good cast, well worth repeating." "Oh." "I thought I was alone." "It's one of the great American films." "It's right up there with Citizen Kane and Sunset Boulevard." "It's usually discussed as "Oh, just a horror movie", but it's much more complex." "Do you know who Henry Frankenstein is?" "And who you are?" "Yes." "I know." "Made me from dead." "The various story elements, the intellectual elements, the artistic and acting elements that came to bear in this film, really crystallised all the things that had been building in that genre, at that studio, at that time." "I love dead." "Hate living." "You're wise in your generation." "The Bride of Frankenstein quite simply is the most complex and most brilliantly achieved and conceived horror film ever made, and certainly the crowning jewel in Universal's initial series of horror films." "You make man like me?" "No." "Woman." "Friend for you." "It's a wonderful film." "It's just delightful." "Certainly there are some scenes where humour and terror are all beautifully blended." "When you get into Bride of Frankenstein, you're making it all up." "There are no rules." "The only rules are those of the imagination." "Whale had an extraordinary imagination." "There are some imaginations which are best left to go do their own Gothic thing." "This isn't science." "It's more like black magic." "When Universal unleashed the original Frankenstein in 1931, it found a new formula for box-office magic." "In a stunning portrayal, Boris Karloff was catapulted to international stardom." "James Whale, well-regarded for his British stage work, had been imported to Hollywood for his ability to direct dialogue." "Ironically, as movies were learning to talk, it was a silent performance that made the Hollywood careers of both Karloff and Whale." "Universal's founder, Carl Laemmle, didn't want his son, Carl Junior, to make films like Dracula and Frankenstein." "But there was no arguing with the box office." "As soon as Frankenstein was complete, the studio began planning a follow-up." "This time it was the director who objected." "James Whale didn't want to do a sequel to Frankenstein." "He seemed to be trying to squirm out of it, as it were, avoid it, bypass it." "Do something else instead." "He said he'd gotten everything out of the first one, that he'd "wrung it dry"." "Maybe that was the phrase." "You have to remember that Frankenstein was the Jaws or Star Wars of its day." "It was such a big hit." "The studio had so much invested in it that finally he agreed to do it." "But again I love the fact that he only did it on his terms." "Meantime, Universal again teamed Whale and Karloff for The Old Dark House, a sardonic thriller that introduced Whale's mischievous sense of humour." "The Invisible Man, with Claude Rains, mixed laughs and chills, and showcased state-of-the-art special effects." "The effects in The Invisible Man are just extraordinary." "You still watch them and wonder how some were done." "You're crazy to know who I am, aren't you?" "All right/ I'll show you." "There's a souvenir for you." "And one for you." "I'll show you who I am and what I am." "How do you like that, eh?" "Whale directed some stylish non-horror films for Universal in the early '30s, including By Candlelight in the manner of Lubitsch, an adaptation of Galsworthy's One More River, and a screwball comedy mystery Remember Last Night?" "He always had very mixed feelings about his horror films." "He liked them, but he wanted to be an A-list director." "He wanted to make the big-money projects, like John Stahl at Universal did." "And, curiously enough, who remembers who John Stahl was?" "But we all remember the movies made by James Whale." "Junior Laemmle, who was the general manager at Universal, had enormous respect for Whale." "I think that he felt that certainly what Whale had done with Frankenstein, The Old Dark House, The Invisible Man, with the other non-horror-genre films that he had done, showed a great stylist at work." "Although Junior Laemmle himself was not a creative man, he had a very instinctive feel, I think, for something that was good." "I think he felt James Whale was the director at Universal who probably had the best chance of putting Universal on par with MGM, and with Warner Bros, and with the big boys in Hollywood." "So he really gave him free rein to do whatever he wanted with the picture." "After rejecting several scripts for the Frankenstein sequel," "Whale took personal control over the screenplay's development." "The fact that Whale didn't especially want to make the film, and then agreed to, prompted him to offer ideas for the script to the writers." "Suggest things." "At least, we have a very good indication that he did this." "People such as Elsa Lanchester mentioned this, that this was his idea, that that was his idea." "The little people in the bottles was his idea." "He insisted that he have the opening prologue with Mary Shelley and Byron and Percy Shelley." "That was essential, otherwise he wouldn't do it." "Elsa Lanchester, for example, told me that Whale insisted that she be allowed to play Mary Shelley, and also the bride." "It was either that or he wouldn't make the film." "It was a great thrill to meet Elsa Lanchester." "I met her in 1981." "She said that it was Whale's intention to show that very pretty people, which is how Mary Shelley is presented in the film, actually inside have very wicked thoughts." "Can you believe that lovely brow conceived of Frankenstein?" "A monster created from cadavers out of rifled graves?" "The money was available to him to make a much more elaborate film than the first one." "Because of the success, they let him go with the sets, and go with the care and the time and the photography and the music, so that he could polish and refine and elaborate, in a way that the earlier films, which were made faster, wouldn't have permitted." "It's an odd sequel in many ways." "For example, after a brief glimpse of the monster in the beginning of the movie, he doesn't show up again for a half-hour, a third of the way into the movie." "Meanwhile, you've spent most of your time with this odd character, Dr Pretorius." "I think if you look at Dr Pretorius, that's an example of how the movie has changed so radically from the first one." "In the first one, there was the boring Dr Waldman." "And in this one, suddenly there's this full-blown eccentric, very, very gay and funny character, that was created by Whale in the development of the screenplay for the second film." "Frankenstein." "Yes, there have been developments since he came to me." "Unlike the original film, Mary Shelley's novel featured a highly articulate monster." "Bride of Frankenstein restored the monster's speech." "Before you came, I was all alone." "It is bad to be alone." "Alone." "Bad." "Friend." "Good." "Speech was the essential difference between the original Frankenstein and the Bride of Frankenstein." "My father really objected to the monster being given speech." "He felt it would take away from the original portrayal, and I think he was wrong." "Cinema history has proven him wrong." "It's one of the few sequels that really... most film critics regard as surpassing the original." "Once more, Boris Karloff faced a gruelling and uncomfortable make-up, designed and applied by the legendary Jack Pierce." "One of the changes in the make-up, besides the fact that Karloff had gained weight..." "He wasn't as cadaverous." "I think success..." "He was able to eat more and unfortunately he had a little fuller face." "But one of the biggest changes was the results of the fire." "So they singed his hair off and gave him almost this crew cut, which through the film grows, which I thought was pretty neat." "His make-up goes through four or five stages of regeneration, allowing him to grow both visually as well as spiritually as the film unfolds." "They gave him a burn on his hand and a bit of a burn on this side of his face." "But other than that the make-up was basically the same." "The flat head, and they still had the electrodes in the brow." "Just a slightly fuller face with a few little burn scars and the singed-off hair." "A great make-up." "Actually there was another change." "In the original make-up, he only had one clamp on his head - this side actually." "It was something they didn't notice for the longest time." "You would see pictures from the Bride, and you saw the two big clamps, the little ones in-between and the ones on the side." "I used to always assume that was the same on the original make-up." "Later, when I started looking at it, I said "He only has one clamp."" "During the filming of Frankenstein, Karloff sustained a serious back injury, and suffered many discomforts due to the weighted boots and padded costume." "For the sequel, efforts were made to lessen the ordeal." "I'm sure they treated him more like a star, because he was successful with Frankenstein and some films after that." "I think that, in the original, the top of his head was probably fabricated each day, built up out of cotton and collodion." "In the Bride and the Son later on, there was a rubber forehead that went on, which probably sped up the process for Boris and Jack." "I know they gave Karloff a slant board, because he still couldn't quite sit down." "I have a picture in my office of him in this great slant board, drinking a cup of tea." "The make-up posed technical challenges for cinematographer John Mescall, who required special lighting for the monster's skin tones." "Jack Pierce's make-up for the monster essentially was a blue-green colour." "This was not due to any belief in a colour aesthetic for the monster." "But if the monster were photographed wearing this shade of greasepaint, on orthochromatic film, and if he was lit as Mescall lit him, with blue-gelled light, he would read as dead white." "Mescall had red added into the make-up of those who had scenes with the monster and often trained warmer lights on them." "The make-up for the Bride of Frankenstein is an absolute masterpiece." "It's the only iconic female monster to ever come out of the movies." "I mean, if you were to think of a classic female monster, it's the Bride of Frankenstein that comes to mind." "The Elsa Lanchester make-up was very different from the Karloff make-up." "I'm sure what they wanted to do was have her attractive." "You didn't want to have a hideous woman monster." "I don't know if it was an executive decision or what." ""We can't have an ugly woman monster."" "So they came up with this..." "again, another icon." "You think of the Bride of Frankenstein, everybody knows that wacky hairstyle." "It had that Egyptian Nefertiti look to it." "They had this wire cage on her head and that was really her hair mixed in with it." "They probably filled it in with some crepe wool." "And the white streaks, the crazy white streaks." "Yet she was very made-up, almost wore basically a glamour make-up." "If it wasn't for the scar around the neck, it would have looked like some glamorous woman with a wacky hairstyle." "I heard that Elsa Lanchester wasn't too fond of Pierce, which I was sorry to hear." "Someone who I idolise like Jack Pierce." "I've heard from people that he was a crotchety old guy." "Elsa Lanchester talked about Jack Pierce, and she said that he was an unusual personality." "He really almost felt, in her opinion, that he was a god who created these horror characters that Universal marketed." "In the morning, he'd be all dressed up in a surgeon's smock as if he were about to perform an operation." "She said you went into his sanctum sanctorum to have the make-up done, and you waited for him to say hello." "You didn't say hello first." "He had to say hello first." "So he was very, very much in control." "He really was a divine presence within his own realm of creating these make-ups." "She was very funny." "She talked about the scar under the neck of the bride." "She said that Jack Pierce took the longest time to do this, that he went through this incredible ritual of applying this scar, that she said hardly shows in the film." "She said "I'm sure he could have bought a scar for ten cents in a joke shop."" "But he had his own way of doing it, and he lovingly and painstakingly applied this scar each morning to the bride." "The idea of the hiss of the female monster came from she and Charles Laughton feeding the swans at Regents Park." "She said "When swans would come up, if you went to feed them, that was all right, but if you got too near them or got near their young, they would hiss."" "So she thought of this incredible hiss of the swans and she incorporated it into the character." "Frankenstein combined English and American actors, not always convincingly." "Bride of Frankenstein was cast mainly with British players." "Mae Clarke, the original Elizabeth, was replaced by the 17-year-old ingénue Valerie Hobson." "Valerie Hobson gives an amazing performance, I think, as Elizabeth." "Very stylised." "She's like a Christmas angel, the way she appears with the dress and the flowing hair." "I talked to her in 1989 and she had warm memories of making the film." "She said the first time she saw Karloff, it was an extraordinary experience." "There he was in complete Frankenstein monster make-up, and she said "I just was so amazed." "All of a sudden he opened his mouth and out came this very gentle British accent with a lisp."" "She said that he was like the great clowns who make you cry." "He really made you cry." "This monster whose heart was just bleeding to get out of his monstrous self, to find somebody to love, to find somebody to love him in return." "And he pulled it off." "Remarkable feat of acting." "She was very impressed by it." "Valerie Hobson was very appreciative of James Whale." "Not only was he a great director, but he was, as she put it, so English." "Here she was, a 17-year-old British girl in Hollywood, and he made her feel very much at home." "She said she was the victim of James Whale's rather bizarre wit, because the first time she met Colin Clive as Henry Frankenstein, it was the scene where she becomes hysterical and falls into bed with him." "As they rehearsed this scene and she fell into bed," "James Whale said "Mr Clive, this is Miss Hobson." And she was in bed with him." "So she said it was pretty strange, even for Hollywood, as an introduction." "Colin Clive played Henry Frankenstein again in one of his last performances." "Emotionally tortured and ravaged by alcohol, he died two years later aged 37." "Frankenstein's mentor, Dr Septimus Pretorius, a role originally intended for Claude Rains, was played by James Whale's real-life theatrical mentor, Ernest Thesiger, an actor reportedly just as eccentric off-screen as on." "To a new world of gods and monsters." "Una O'Connor, who was in The Invisible Man, was another Whale favourite and a perfect choice for Frankenstein's twittering housekeeper, Minnie." "Although Frankenstein's assistant, played by Dwight Frye, met a nasty end in the first film," "James Whale combined several small parts to give the actor a memorable assignment." "Fritz von Frankenstein of course had been killed by the monster in Frankenstein." "Jimmy Whale" " I say Jimmy Whale because that's what my father called him - liked my dad's work." "What we need is a female victim of sudden death." "Can you do it?" "If you promise me a thousand crowns." "It will be well worth it, and the baron will pay." "I'll try." "Bride of Frankenstein is visually the best Universal horror classic, thanks to art director Charles Hall and cinematographer John Mescall." "Expressionistic tricks, totally artificial lighting, these great painted skyscapes, and the way the tombs are all at weird angles." "Magnificent stuff like that." "One of the things that intrigues me about Whale's career, his work in general, is the background..." "the backgrounds that he had." "That is, as a theatre actor and theatre director, but as a set designer in theatre, as well as a painter and so forth." "One wonders to what extent he might have had input into the visual appearance, the look of the sets of his films, in a way that most directors at that time would not be likely to do." "Elsa Lanchester said, when she was not actually needed on the set at one point, he took her to the studio and showed off the forest set." "He was proud of his achievement here." "I said "Was this his design?"" "This telephone-pole forest, where the tree trunks are just trunks and it's just bare and stark, in contrast to earlier, when there's a bucolic scene and it's a very attractive nature forest." "She said "Yes, of course it was his idea."" "Not that he drew the plans for it, but he would give the ideas and maybe make little sketches and give them to the department heads and have them develop it." "Cinematographer Mescall achieved new visual heights with Bride of Frankenstein, the result of a seasoned working relationship with Whale." "John Mescall did a total of five pictures with James Whale." "Bride is probably his best remembered." "The film itself is probably the high-mark of Whale's late period at Universal." "Mescall used a style of lighting he referred to as Rembrandt lighting, which was to use a central light and a cross-light about three-quarters through the scene, to provide illumination of the subject against a dark background." "It's very much like Rembrandt's painting style, where there is light that is directional and gives contours and definition." "The crowning touch in Bride of Frankenstein was the inspired musical score by Franz Waxman." "You've got a first-rate cast in an extremely well-written script with a tremendous musical score." "One of the most important Hollywood scores of the mid-'30s by Franz Waxman." "For the opening sequence of Byron and Shelley on a stormy evening at the villa," "Waxman wrote a very charming period-style minuet, which speaks of the life of ease and delicacy that we see depicted." "As the flashback story is told by Byron..." ""A winter setting in the churchyard..."" "...he evolves into a huge fugue to illustrate the horrors and terrors of the original story, before returning back to the minuet that sets us pretty much with period parlour music." "There is an awful lot of commentary through the music." "Sometimes impish, sometimes emotionally reinforcing, but, like so much that's in this film, heightened." "The basic structure of Waxman's score is Wagnerian." "He uses motives for each of the major characters or sequences." "These are thematic building blocks which can introduce or herald each character's entrance or imply their presence off-camera when they aren't present." "Almost operatically, isn't it?" "The leitmotif approach, where you have a particular phrase or melody associated with a person, one character or a different character." "The monster has a four-note motive which seems to be patterned upon his growl." "It's almost as if Waxman had observed the performance and deduced that from it." "The bride herself has a very exotic high-flown three-note melody." "It is very open-ended and that allows it to be utilised in many different forms." "We first hear it, narrative-wise, when Pretorius speaks of her imminent birth." " Friend for you." " Woman?" "Friend." "Yes." "Dr Pretorius, who is the kind of Mephistophelean interloper." "He's a figure both of humour and tremendous evil." "He has a very mad, loping theme." "It portends all kinds of things to come, usually resolved with a small coda, which is again open-ended and unresolved." "You never know what Pretorius is going to do or where his actions will lead." "There's a wonderful sequence, where he is slightly drunk in the crypt, dreaming of monsters to come, and is surprised by the Karloff creature." "It's done in a very metric fashion, recalling the Danse Macabre of Saint-Saëns." "In fact Waxman called the cue Danse Macabre." "Bride of Frankenstein attracted censorship, during and after production." "The prologue was shortened, in part to eliminate all close-ups of Elsa Lanchester's décolletage." "That was just the beginning." "The film had about 15 minutes of cuts made before it was nationally released." "I think again Universal was trying to play it safe." "The film was incredibly outrageous and in some ways almost subversive." "I think they wanted to make sure it didn't get them in too much trouble." "Like all Hollywood scripts, the script for the Bride had to be presented to the Breen office, the censorship board within Hollywood, to have approval and discussion of any objectionable issues." "The script contained many religious references, some of which could be intended or construed as bordering on blasphemy." "It may be that I'm intended to know the secret of life." "It may be part of the divine plan." "Henry, don't say those things." "Don't think them." "It's blasphemous and wicked." "We are not meant to know those things." "The monster is man-made, not God-made, but he goes through a Christ-like orbit of misunderstanding and ultimate betrayal." "The original script had the monster mistaking the figure on a crucifix for a suffering, persecuted creature like himself." "The censors would have none of that, so now the Christus is a background prop and he instead - more blasphemously - topples the statue of a bishop, as though he's assaulting organised religion." "That's a visual cue that was not in the script and therefore didn't receive objection." "When Henry and Dr Pretorius speak about the possible mad plan to create new female life, the blasphemous Dr Pretorius invokes religious iconography and says "Follow the lead of nature, or of God..."" "It was scripted "...if you like your fairytales."" "Well, this is not how one speaks about organised religion." "It's changed to "Bible stories", which is a statement of fact." "Follow the lead of nature, or of God, if you like your Bible stories." "The way Ernest Thesiger reads the line," ""Bible stories" contains such invective and disdain that it's more offensive than if he'd said "fairytales"." "This is how one got around the letter of the censor and the spirit of intent." "Bride initially had a fairly lengthy subplot involving the Dwight Frye character." "It was probably a misbegotten script idea that was meant to illustrate the monster as victim." "Carl had this uncle and aunt in the film, who he killed, and led everybody to believe that the monster had killed them." "It was probably about a ten-minute sequence followed by a morgue inquest." "It had no bearing on the narrative line and probably stopped the film dead in its tracks at the midpoint." "Whale, probably wisely, removed this, and that narrative bridge was filled by a retake, where the monster is discovered in the woods, quite benignly trying to get food from some Gypsies, who of course react in abject terror." "This leads us on to the monster and the hermit sequence." "Every time I watch that scene with the hermit, the blind man," "I'm struck by how sincerely moving it is." "There is no overtone there of condescension or ridicule or making fun of either of those two characters in that scene, or of their relationship, of their need for each other, and their relief at finding a friend." "It wasn't just "I'm going to play games with odd humour."" "It was sensitivity, and that sensibility of the warmth and mutual need that those people find, that he indulged himself with too." "That wasn't in the first film either." "Those kinds of feelings - both extremes - weren't in the first film." "Humour has never been so artfully blended into a horror film as in the Bride." "Very bizarre, this little chap." "There's a certain resemblance to me, don't you think?" "Or do I flatter myself?" "Hindsight tells us that Whale's sense of humour is sort of camp." "I'm not sure that that's really quite how it was at the time." "I think the camp and kitschy elements of his humour may be something..." "a gloss we're putting on it, some 60 years... 65 years after the picture was made." "The humour in Bride of Frankenstein permeates much of the story line." "It isn't in comedy-relief segments, but it is part and parcel with the characters and what they do in the main story line." "Pretorius is a comic figure because of the way he stands outside of life, of the world, of Henry, of his own existence, and comments on it, if only in the irony of his perspective." "He doesn't take existence seriously." "So he makes comments about his creations of these little people, he makes comments about himself being like the devil or vice versa." "He has an ironic twist to existence, which is, from what I can tell, something that he shares - that character shares - and the actor who played him, Ernest Thesiger, shared - with James Whale himself." "Dr Pretorius is firstly an archetypal old queen." "I think we should fess up about that right from the beginning." "He is however also Mephistopheles to Colin Clive as Frankenstein's..." "Faust, I think." "He's the one seducing Frankenstein away from, if I may say, the straight and narrow back into this very much more twisted vision of what he should be doing with his life." "I gather we not only did her hair, but dressed her." "What a couple of queens we are, Colin." "Yes, that's right." "A couple of flaming queens." "Pretorius is a little bit in love with Dr Frankenstein, you know." "The gay sensibility responds to outsiders." "Bride of Frankenstein contains several." "Pretorius is an outsider." "Frankenstein becomes an outsider by being seduced away from marriage and the home to becoming the mad scientist again." "And most obviously, most dramatically, and most poignantly, the monster is an outsider." "It's very tempting to assume that Whale identified with an individual who is an outsider like this, that the average person does not understand." "I'm sure James Whale knew what that felt like when he was a youth, as an artistically inclined person in a factory town, in a factory family." "He knew what that was like probably well before he knew it as a homosexual." "But it was also the artistry, being an artist, being a sensitive person, being somebody who people made fun of, for whatever reason." "You find that in so many of the characters in Bride of Frankenstein." "The film also makes a serious comment on the tensions, sometimes violent, between society and the non-conforming individual." "The monster is... the unleashing of the id, that which must be kept under control, and when it's unleashed, this is a threat to stability of society, of human nature." "So somebody must come and either kill or otherwise tame that monster that's been unleashed." "And the villagers do that." "The villagers in Frankenstein and in Bride are almost the villains of the piece." "That's especially the case in the end of Frankenstein, where they're a lynch mob." "He had the idea that, when people thought as a group, it could only lead to trouble." "Somehow the mob mentality was a scarier thing to face than any monster could possibly be." "With Show Boat, Whale had nearly achieved his dream of creative autonomy and prestige productions." "But Universal was burdened with debt and in 1936 Carl Laemmle lost his studio." "Whale had this amazing niche for five years, working under Junior Laemmle." "He almost acted as an independent filmmaker today." "He really had control." "There was nobody - either a studio person or a producer - over his shoulder, telling him what to do." "When the Laemmles lost control over Universal, that was gone." "Whale suddenly found himself working for people who were not in sympathy with his methods at all." "It was much closer to the factory assembly-line form of filmmaking that they were doing at MGM and the other studios." "Whale worked very badly in those conditions." "Whale's last stand at Universal was The Road Back, an uncompromising sequel to All Quiet on the Western Front." "Under pressure from Germany, the studio regime severely cut the picture and it died at the box office." "Whale retired from Hollywood in 1941." "Although financially secure for life, he did not live to enjoy the critical acclaim his work finally received." "Disabled and disoriented by a series of strokes, he took his own life in 1957." "Without Whale's masterful touch, the later Frankenstein films were of little interest to their star." "My father played the monster three times." "The third time was Son of Frankenstein, and at that point he decided he would not do it again." "He felt that the story line had been exhausted and the monster, as he had created him, had done all that he should be asked to do." "He was afraid that it would become the brunt of bad jokes and bad scripts, and there are those that would agree with him." "Bill Condon's Academy Award-winning film Gods and Monsters featured a reunion between the stars of Bride of Frankenstein and their director." "Hey, you/ With the camera/ We got a historical moment here." "This is Mr James Whale, who made "Frankenstein" and "Bride of Frankenstein"." "And this - forget the baby a second - is the monster and his bride." "Oh, Karloff." "Right" "Don't you just love being famous?" "The figure of the bride is so iconic that she crops up in all kinds of films." "There's this absolutely wonderful Bride of Frankenstein parody in Small Soldiers." "The Bride of Frankenstein shows up in the Bride of Chucky in a very clever way." "She's alive/ Alive" "We belong dead." "You can do a little drawing of the bride and people will say "I know what that is."" "I remember building little Aurora kits of the Bride of Frankenstein when I was a little kid, way before I could see the movies, and being totally enchanted by these creatures lumbering across my desk when I went to sleep at night." "It felt safe." "Some of these youngsters - seven, eight, nine years old - they know the script backwards and forwards." "Of course, with the advent of video, it brought it into everybody's living room, and now on DVD." "It perpetuates the availability, and the appeal is long-lasting and multi-generational." "It's a brilliant film, it's a work of genius." "I think it's a picture in which the acting, particularly the performances of Karloff and Elsa Lanchester, Ernest Thesiger, transcend anything you saw being done in Hollywood at that time." "Brilliant, almost operatic performances." "And if ever somebody needs to study a film to see how a director injects his own personality into a picture," "Bride of Frankenstein is the perfect example." "You can almost watch it and feel like you spent an evening with James Whale, listening to his wit, his ideas, and listening to his remarkable personality." "It's all there in that movie." "It's like an evening with Jimmy." "1935 was an incredible year for horror movies." "In addition to Bride of Frankenstein, there was Werewolf of London," "The Raven, Mark of the Vampire and Mad Love." "All these are classics, but, almost 70 years later, Bride of Frankenstein towers above them." "As a follow-up, James Whale was scheduled to direct Dracula's Daughter as a baroque black comedy even more outrageous than Bride of Frankenstein." "But the script was too much for the censors." "We missed the daughter, but we still have the bride, and that's something to be grateful for." "I'm Joe Dante." "How beautifully dramatic." "The crudest, savage, exhibition of nature at her worst, without, and we three, we elegant three, within." "I should like to think that an irate Jehovah was pointing those arrows of lightning directly at my head." "The unbowed head of George Gordon, Lord Byron, England's greatest sinner." "But I cannot flatter myself to that extent." "Possibly those thunders are for our dear Shelley." "Heaven's applause for England's greatest poet." " What of my Mary?" " She is an angel." " You think so?" " (thunder)" "You hear?" "Come, Mary." "Come and watch the storm." "You know how lightning alarms me." "Shelley, darling, will you please light these candles for me?" "Mary, darling." "Astonishing creature." " I, Lord Byron?" " Frightened of thunder, fearful of the dark." "And yet you have written a tale that sent my blood into icy creeps." "Look at her, Shelley." "Can you believe that lovely brow conceived of Frankenstein?" "A monster created from cadavers out of rifled graves." " Isn't it astonishing?" " I don't know why you should think so." "What do you expect?" "Such an audience needs something stronger than a pretty little love story." "So why shouldn't I write of monsters?" "No wonder Murray's refused to publish the book." "His public would be shocked." "It will be published, I think." "Then, darling, you will have much to answer for." "The publishers did not see that my purpose was to write a moral lesson of the punishment that befell a mortal man who dared to emulate God." "Whatever your purpose was, I take great relish in savouring each separate horror." "I roll them over on my tongue." "Don't, Lord Byron." "Don't remind me of it tonight." "What a setting in that churchyard to begin with!" "The sobbing women, the first clod of earth on the coffin." "That was a pretty chill." "Frankenstein and the dwarf stealing the body out of its new-made grave." "Cutting the hanged man down from the gallows, where he swung in the wind." "The cunning of Frankenstein in his mountain laboratory, picking dead men apart and building up a human monster so fearful and so horrible that only a half-crazed brain could have devised." "And then the murders, the little child who drowned." "Henry Frankenstein himself thrown from the top of the burning mill by the very monster he had created." "And it was these fragile white fingers that penned the nightmare." "Ah!" "You've made me prick myself, Byron." "It's bleeding." "There, there." "I do think it a shame, Mary, to end your story quite so suddenly." "That wasn't the end at all." "Would you like to hear what happened after that?" "I feel like telling it." "It's a perfect night for mystery and horror." "The air itself is filled with monsters." "I'm all ears." "While heaven blasts the night without, open up your pits of hell." "Well, then, imagine yourselves standing by the wreckage of the mill." "The fire is dying down." "Soon the bare skeleton of the building rolls over, the gaunt rafters against the sky." "(yelling)" "Well, I must say, that's the best fire I ever saw in all me life." " What are you cryin' for?" " It's terrible." "I know." "But after all them murders and poor Mr Henry being brought home to die," "I'm glad to see the monster roasted to death before my very eyes." "It's too good for him." "It's all the devil's work, and you'd better cross yourself quick before he gets you." "Come along, come along." "It's all over." "Get back to your homes and go to sleep." "There it goes again." "It ain't burnt out at all." " There's more yet." " Isn't the monster dead yet?" "It's high time every decent man and wife was in bed." "That's his insides caught at last." "Insides is always the last to be consumed." "Move on." "You've had enough excitement for one night." "This strange man you call a monster is dead." "Monster, indeed!" "You may thank your lucky stars they sent for me to safeguard life and property." "Why didn't you safeguard those drownded and murdered?" "Come, now." "We want no rallying, no riots." " Who's rioting'?" " Move on, move on." "Good night all, and pleasant dreams." "Ah, pleasant dreams yourself." "Thinks he's everybody just because he's a burgomaster." "Huh!" "Poor Mr Henry." "He was to have been married today to that lovely girl Elizabeth." "Cover him up." "Someone must break the news to the poor girl." "Ride as fast as you can to the castle, and tell the old Baron Frankenstein we are bringing his son home." " Oh, dear." " Oh, shut up." "Come home, Hans." "The monster is dead now." "Nothing could be left alive in that furnace." "Why do you stay here?" "I want to see with my own eyes." "Oh, Hans, he must be dead." "And, dead or alive, nothing can bring our little Maria back to us." "If I can see his blackened bones, I can sleep at night." "Come back, Hans!" "You will be burned yourself!" "Maria drowned to death and you burned up!" "What should I do then?" "No!" "(growls)" "Hans." "Hans!" "Where are you?" "Hans!" "Are you all right?" "I hear you." "Here, give me your hand, Hans." "Here." "(screams)" "(growls)" "(screams)" "(bangs on door)" "Oh, heaven, what is this?" "Henry?" "Tell me." "Oh, milady, how can we tell you?" "Bring him in." " Albert." " What do you want?" "It's alive." "The monster, it's alive!" " Ah, shut up, you old fool." " I saw it." "It ain't turned to no skeleton at all." "It lived right through the fire." "Ah, go bite your tongue off." "We don't believe in ghosts." "Nobody'll believe me." "All right, I'll wash my hands of it." "Let 'em all be murdered in their beds." " Speak to me, Henry." " Oh, milady, he'll never speak again." "I was foretold of this." "I was told beware my wedding night." "Oh, look, milady!" "He's alive!" "Henry, darling." "Elizabeth." "Oh, what a terrible wedding night." "You can go to bed now, Mary." " You'll soon be better." " I feel almost myself again." "When you're strong enough, we'll go away and forget this horrible experience." "Forget?" "If only I could forget." "But it's never out of my mind." "I've been cursed for delving into the mysteries of life." "Perhaps death is sacred, and I've profaned it." "For what a wonderful vision it was." "I dreamed of being the first to give to the world the secret that God is so jealous of." "The formula for life." "Think of the power to create a man." "And I did." "I did it." "I created a man." "And who knows?" "In time I could have trained him to do my will." "I could have bred a race." "I might even have found the secret of eternal life." "Henry, don't say those things." "Don't think them." "It's blasphemous and wicked." "We are not meant to know those things." "It may be that I'm intended to know the secret of life." "It may be part of the divine plan." "No, no." "It's the devil that prompts you." "It's death, not life, that is in it all and at the end of it all." "Listen, while you've been lying here, tossing in your delirium, I couldn't sleep." "And when you rave of your insane desire to create living men from the dust of the dead, a strange apparition has seemed to appear in the room." "It comes, a figure like Death." "And each time it comes more clearly, nearer." "It seems to be reaching out for you, as if it would take you away from me!" "There it is." "Look." " There." " I see nothing, Elizabeth." "Where?" "There's nothing there." "There!" "There!" "It's coming for you!" "Nearer!" "Henry!" "Henry!" "Henry!" "Henry!" "(laughs hysterically) Henry!" "(banging on door)" "Albert!" "Drat the man." "He's never here when he's wanted." " What's the good of footmen anyway?" " (bell rings)" "All right." "All right!" "Don't knock the castle over!" "We're not all dead yet." " There's nobody at home." " Let me in, my good woman." "I know the young Baron Frankenstein is at home." "He's sick." "He's in his bed, where all decent folk should be at this time of night." "Tell him that Dr Pretorius is here on a secret matter of grave importance, and must see him alone, tonight." "Dr Pretorius?" "Pretorius?" " What was it?" "What was the name?" " Dr Pretorius." "There ain't no such name." "Now, you stay there." " Who's there?" " It's Minnie, milady." "(Henry) Oh, come in." "It's Dr Pretorius." "He says he wants to see the master." "Most insistent." "Pretorius?" "He's a very queer-looking old gentleman, sir." "And must see you, on a secret, grave matter, he said." "Tonight." "Alone." " Bring him in." " Henry, who is this man?" "Dr Pretorius." "Baron Frankenstein now, I believe?" "Won't you come in, Doctor?" "I trust you will pardon this intrusion at so late an hour." "I would not have ventured to come, had I not a communication to make which I suspect may be of the utmost importance to yourself." "This is Professor Pretorius." "He used to be Doctor of Philosophy at the university." " But, uh..." " But was booted out." "Booted, my dear Baron, is the word." "For knowing too much." "Henry's been very ill, Professor." "He shouldn't be disturbed." "I am also a doctor, Baroness." "Why have you come here tonight?" "My business with you, Baron, is private." "Elizabeth, please." "I do hope he won't upset Henry." " What do you want?" " We must work together." "Never." "This is outrageous." "I'm through with it." "I'll have no more of this hell-spawn." "As soon as I'm well, I'm to be married, and I'm going away." "I must beg you to reconsider." "You know, do you not, that it is you, really, who are responsible for all those murders?" "There are penalties to pay for killing people." "And with your creature still at large in the countryside..." "Are you threatening me?" "Don't put it so crudely." "I had ventured to hope that you and I together, no longer as master and pupil, but as fellow scientists, might probe the mysteries of life and death..." "Never." "No further." "...and reach a goal undreamed of by science." "I can't make any further experiments." "I've had a terrible lesson." "That is sad, very sad." "But you and I have gone too far to stop." "Nor can it be stopped so easily." "I also have continued with my experiments." "That is why I am here tonight." "You must see my creation." "Have you also succeeded in bringing life to the dead?" "If you, Herr Baron, will do me the honour of visiting my humble abode," "I think you will be interested in what I have to show you." "After 20 years of secret scientific research, and countless failures," "I also have created life, as we say, in God's own image." "I must know." "When can I see it?" "I thought you might change your mind." "Why not tonight?" "It is not very late." " Is it far?" " No, but you will need a coat." "I think your coachman had better wait here." "Won't you sit down, Herr Baron?" "Before I show you the results of my trifling experiments," "I would like to drink to our partnership." "Do you like gin?" "It is my only weakness." "To a new world of gods and monsters." "Creation of life is enthralling, distinctly enthralling, is it not?" "I cannot account precisely for all that I am going to show you." "But perhaps now that you are my partner, you can." "My experiments did not turn out quite like yours, Henry." "But science, like love, has her little surprises, as you shall see." "Good heavens, Doctor." "What are these?" "There is a pleasing variety about my exhibits." "My first experiment was so lovely that we made her a queen." "Charming, don't you think?" "Then, of course, we had to have a king." "Now he's so madly in love with her that we have to segregate them." "Now now." "I have to be very careful with the king." "Now, behave." "My next production looked so disapprovingly at the other two that they made him an archbishop." "He seems to be asleep." "I must wake him up." "The next one is the very devil." "Very bizarre, this little chap." "There's a certain resemblance to me, don't you think?" "Or do I flatter myself?" "I took a great deal of pains with him." "Sometimes I have wondered whether life wouldn't be much more amusing if we were all devils, and no nonsense about angels and being good." "Oh, there's the king out again." "Even royal amours are a nuisance." "(squeaking)" "(blows whistle)" "Poor Archbishop." "He has his hands full." "There." "That'll keep you quiet." "My little ballerina is charming, but such a bore." "She'll only dance to Mendelssohn's "Spring Song", and it gets so monotonous." "My next is very conventional, I'm afraid." "But you can never tell how these things will turn out." "It was an experiment with seaweed." "Normal size has been my difficulty." "You did achieve size." "I need to work that out with you." "But this isn't science." "It's more like black magic." "You think I'm mad." "Perhaps I am." "But listen, Henry Frankenstein, while you were digging in your graves piecing together dead tissues," "I, my dear pupil, went for my material to the source of life." "I grew my creatures, like cultures." "Grew them as nature does, from seed." "But, still, you did achieve results that I have missed." "Now, think." "What a world-astounding collaboration we should be, you and I, together." "No." "No, no, no." "Leave the charnel house and follow the lead of nature, or of God, if you like your Bible stories." "Male and female, created He them." "Be fruitful and multiply." "Create a race, a man-made race upon the face of the earth." "Why not?" "I daren't." "I daren't even think of such a thing." "Our mad dream is only half realised." "Alone you have created a man." "Now together we will create his mate." "You mean...?" "Yes, a woman." "That should be really interesting." "(cries out)" "Please don't touch me!" " There she is!" "Quick!" " (screams)" "There he is." "Shoot." "Run to the village, quick." "It's the monster." "Tell the burgomaster." " What is it now?" " The monster!" "He's in the woods." "Get the bloodhounds." "Raise all the men you can, lock the women indoors and wait for me." "Now then!" "Monster, indeed!" "I'll show him." "Follow me." "(growls)" "Where is he?" "Bind him securely." "I don't want anything slipshod." "Tie his feet first." "His feet first!" "I get no cooperation." "None at all." "Have you got him?" "That's what I want to know." "Have you got him?" "Of course we've got him, my good woman." "A good job too." "Mind he don't get loose again." "He might do some damage and hurt somebody." " Bring him down when you've bound him." " You want any help there?" "I'll bind him!" "Now take him down to the old dungeon and put him in chains." "There you are." "Find some rope and tie him up." "Come on, then." "Get back to your work." "Keep still." "That's quite enough." "Come and lock your doors." "We can't take all day over this." "I'd hate to find him under my bed at night." "He's a nightmare in the daylight, he is." "Get away, there!" "Clear that window!" "Hah!" "You mind your own business and see he doesn't get out." "He's dangerous." "Now I can get back to more important duties." " Way past our hours." " Hm?" " The night, sir." " Monster, indeed." "Tush, tush." "(growls)" "He's loose!" "Shoot him!" "Help!" "He's loose!" "Go to your homes." "Just an escaped lunatic." "Merely wanted someone to handle it, that's all." "Quite harmless." "Shoot him!" "Why don't you shoot him?" "Where's Frieda?" "Frieda!" "Frieda!" " Frieda?" "Where's Frieda?" " She just left." " Oh, look!" " (screams)" "Frieda!" "Oh, what have they done to you?" "(terrible scream)" "Mrs Newman." "Oh!" "Come on!" "(moaning)" " Poor old Newman." " Where's his wife, Frau Newman?" "Frau Newman." " Frau Newman!" " Frau Newman!" "Frau Newman!" "(moaning)" "There's another one in there." " Frau Newman." " (gasps)" "Aurora, you stay close to me." "We'd better get away from these parts." " It isn't safe." " Why?" "I'm frightened." "The monster." "Ah, there's no danger." "He's safe in jail and they'll keep him there." "Where's the pepper and salt?" "We got no pepper and salt." "All right, Mother." "I'll get it." "Don't worry." "You shall have your meat." "Ah." "(sniffs)" " (grunts) - (screams)" "Get away from there." "(cries)" "(growls)" "(# violin plays Schubert's "Ave Maria")" "(small grunts of pleasure)" "Who's there?" "(growls)" "Who is it?" "You're welcome, my friend, whoever you are." "Who are you?" "I think you're a stranger to me." "I cannot see you." "I cannot see anything." "You must please excuse me, but I am blind." "(small grunts)" "Come in, my poor friend." "No one will hurt you here." "If you're in trouble, perhaps I can help you." "But you need not tell me about it if you don't want to." " What's the matter?" " (growls)" "You're hurt, my poor friend." "Come." "Sit down." "Now tell me, who are you?" "(faint moans)" "I don't understand." "Can you not speak?" "It's strange." "Perhaps... perhaps you're afflicted too." "I cannot see and you cannot speak." "Is that it?" "If you understand what I'm saying, put your hand on my shoulder." "That is good." "No, you stay here." "I'll get you some food." "We shall be friends." "I have prayed many times for God to send me a friend." "It's very lonely here, and it's been a long time since any human being came into this hut." "I shall look after you, and you will comfort me." "Now you must lie down, and go to sleep." "Yes, yes, now you must sleep." "Our Father, I thank thee, that, in thy great mercy, thou hast taken pity on my great loneliness." "And now, out of the silence of the night, hath brought two of thy lonely children together, and sent me a friend to be a light to mine eyes and a comfort in time of trouble." "Amen." "And now for our lesson." "Remember, this is bread." "Bread." "Bread." "And this is wine... to drink." " Drink." " Drink." "Good." "Good." "We are friends, you and I." " Friends." " Friends." " Good." " Good!" "And now for a smoke." "(laughs)" "No, no." "This is good." "Smoke." "You try." "Smoke." "Good, good." "Good." "Before you came, I was all alone." "It is bad to be alone." "Alone." "Bad." "Friend." "Good." "Friend." "Good." "Now, come here." "And what is this?" "This is wood for the fire." "Wood." " And this is fire." " (growls)" "No, no." "Fire is good." "Fire no good." "There is good and there is bad." "Good." "Bad." "Good." "Music?" "(knocking)" "Can you tell us how to get out of this wood?" "We've lost our way." "Come in, friends, and rest a while." " Look." " It's the monster." "(growls)" "What are you doing?" "This is my friend." "Friend?" "This is the fiend that's been murdering half the countryside." "Good heavens, man, can't you see?" "Oh, he's blind." "He isn't human." "Frankenstein made him out of dead bodies." "(growls)" "My friend." "Why do you do this?" "Friend." "Look." "(screaming)" "(growls)" "Which way did he go?" "This way!" "He's gone this way!" "Friend." "(tapping)" "(rattling)" " I can smell the ghosts already." " I never could stand graves." "Shut up and follow me." "Read the inscription." "What does it say?" ""Died 1899." "Maddalena Ernestine, beloved daughter of..."" "Oh, never mind that." "How old was she?" ""Aged 19 years, three months."" "Well, that's the one." "Get to work." " What are you waiting for?" " Mercy on us." " You want me to send you to the gallows?" " Could be no worse than this." " Well, are you ready?" " Yes." "Here goes." "Pretty little thing, in her way, wasn't she?" "I hope her bones are firm." " It seems lighter now." " Yes." "Well, Doctor, I guess that's all for tonight." " Can we go home now?" " Yes." "I shall wait here for a bit." "I rather like this place." " Be careful nobody sees you leave." " We know." " And leave me that lantern down there." " All right, all right." "If there's more like this, what do you say, pal?" "We give ourselves up and let 'em hang us?" " That goes for me too." " This is no life for murderers." "(laughs)" "I give you the monster." "(laughs)" "Oh." "I thought I was alone." "Good evening." "Smoke." " Friend." " Yes, I hope so." "Have a cigar." "They are my only weakness." "Good, good." "Drink." "Good." "Good." "You make man like me?" "No." "Woman." " Friend for you." " Woman?" "Friend." "Yes." "I want friend." "Like me." "I think you can be very useful." "And you will add a little force to the argument, if necessary." "Do you know who Henry Frankenstein is?" "And who you are?" "Yes." "I know." "Made me from dead." "I love dead." "Hate living." "You're wise in your generation." "We must have a long talk, and then I have an important call to make." "Woman." "Friend." "Wife." "That Dr Pretorius is here again, sir." "There, I knew it." " Send him away." "I won't see him." " I certainly will." "Good evening, Henry." "Baroness, I've not yet had the opportunity of offering you my congratulations on your marriage." " Pray accept them now." " Dr Pretorius." "I don't know what your business is but, whatever it may be," "I tell you frankly that I am not frightened of it or of you." "Henry's been very ill." "He's in no state to be alarmed or annoyed." "Your visit now is most unwelcome." "Henry, I heard the carriage drive up." "I'll see that the baggage is put in." "Then we're leaving." "I think you know why I am here, Henry." "All the necessary preparations are made." "My part in the experiments is complete." "I have created, by my method, a perfect human brain - already living, but dormant." "Everything is now ready for you and me to begin our supreme collaboration." "No, no." "Don't tell me of it." "I don't want to hear." "I've changed my mind." "I won't do it." "I expected this." "I thought we might need another assistant." "Perhaps he can persuade you." " Nothing can persuade me." " We shall see." " No!" "Not that!" " Oh, he's harmless, except when crossed." "Frankenstein." "Yes, there have been developments since he came to me." "Sit down." " What do you want?" " You know." " This is your work." " Yes." "I'll have no hand in such a monstrous thing." " Yes." "Must." " Get him out." "I won't even discuss it until he's gone." "Go now." "(Iow growl)" "Go." " Must do it." " Nothing can make me go on with it." "(growls)" "Now." "Put the bags in the carriage and I'll be out in a moment." "Go and tell the master to hurry, Minnie, or we shall lose the train." "Excuse me for being so nervous, milady, but I don't like leaving you alone." " Oh, nonsense, Minnie, I shall be all right." " I hope so, milady." "Is that you, Henry?" "(screams)" "Henry!" "Henry, help!" "(screams) Henry!" "Milady!" "(screaming)" " Elizabeth." " (Minnie screams)" "What is it?" "What's the matter?" "Oh, sir, she's gone!" "The monster, he's got her!" "I saw it." "The baroness is gone!" "This is Pretorius' doing." "Quick, search parties." "There's not a moment to lose." "(crash)" "I charge you, as you value your mistress' life, to do nothing and say nothing of this episode." "I assure you that the baroness will be safely returned, if you will leave everything to me." "Nothing, that is, except what he demands." "I can find no trace of Elizabeth." "Oh, I admit I'm beaten." "But if you can bring her back," "I'll do anything that you want." "Are you ready to complete with me this final experiment?" " What about Elizabeth?" " She is well, and will be safely returned if you will proceed." " I'm ready." " Ah." "Mind the steps." "They're a bit slimy, I expect." "I think it's a charming house." "It is interesting to think that once upon a time we should have been burnt at the stake as wizards for this experiment." "Doctor, I think the heart is beating." "Look." "It's beating." " But the rhythm of the beat is uneven." " Increase the saline solution." " Is there any life yet?" " No, not life itself yet." "This is only the simulacrum of life." "This action only responds when the current is applied." "We must be patient." "The heart is more complex than any other part of the body." "Look." "The beat is increasing." "Yes..." " It's stopped." " Shall I increase the current?" "This heart is useless." "I must have another." "And it must be sound and young." "Karl." "You must go to your friend at the accident hospital." "What we need is a female victim of sudden death." "Can you do it?" "If you promise me a thousand crowns." "It will be well worth it, and the baron will pay." " Yes, yes." "Go and get it." " I'll try." "There are always accidental deaths occurring." "Always." "I'll get your heart." "I'll go into that room, I'll go into that room and I'll take my knife out." "I'll get her." "I'll hold her down and there she'll be." "Where, I ask you?" "Where will she be?" "A thousand crowns." "It's beating perfectly." "Just as in life." " Oh, if only I can keep it going until..." " It was a very fresh one." "(crash)" "Where did you get it?" "I gave the gendarme 50 crowns." " What gendarme?" " It was a..." " police case." " Yes, very sad." "Only, we can't bother about that now." "Can I do anything?" "No, no, no!" "I can work better alone." "(growls)" " Work." " Where's Elizabeth?" " Have you brought her?" " She wait." "I wait." "I'm exhausted." "I must get sleep." "Work." "Finish." "Then sleep." "But I can't work like this." "He must go away." "Send him away." "I'll settle him for a little while." "Drink." "Drink." "Good." "(drops glass)" "(Pretorius laughs)" "That'll keep you quiet." "Elizabeth - she's dead." "Elizabeth is alive and she is well." " I don't believe you." " I have proof." " Proof?" " In a few moments from now, she will speak to you from where she is through this electrical machine." " Where is she?" " Not far from here." "(buzzing)" "Speak, and she will hear you and answer." "Yes, yes, this is Henry." "Henry, yes, I'm safe." "But, oh, Henry, how long?" "Come for me." "I'm in..." "Elizabeth?" "Elizabeth!" " She's gone." " That is all now." "But you heard her." "Yes, she's alive." "As soon as our work is completed she will be returned to you." "The heart is beating more regularly now." "Yes, it's been beating for nine hours." "Not yet, but soon..." " And the brain?" " Perfect and already in position." " Then we are almost ready." " Almost." "Shall we put the heart in now?" " Yes." " Ludwig." "It's beating quite normally now." "Bring it over." "(thunder)" " The storm is rising." " All right." "The air is heavy with electricity." "It's going to be a terrific storm." "We shall be ready." "Isn't it amazing, Henry, that lying here within this cowl is an artificially developed human brain?" "Each cell, each convolution ready, waiting for life to come." "(thunder)" "Look." "The storm is coming up over the mountains." " It will be here soon." " The kites." "Are the kites ready?" " Yes." " Send them up as soon as the wind rises." " Hurry, hurry!" " The kites, the kites, get 'em ready." "Ludwig!" "He wants the kites!" "Stand back." "Careful on the roof!" "The big diffuser!" "Wires!" "Slip down your wires!" "All right." "Stop your winches." "I'm coming up!" " Now, off with the kites!" " You take number two, Ludwig." " Have you made your connections?" " Yes." "Stand by!" "Let go of number one!" "Let her go!" "It's coming up!" " Go back." "Go back down!" " (growls)" "Go back!" "No!" "Get away!" "Frankenstein!" "Get away!" "Get away!" "(wild screams)" "Don't come near me!" "Get away!" "Don't!" "No!" "No!" "Don't!" "Don't!" "(screams)" "Raise the cosmic diffuser." "Remove the diffuser bands." "(Iow moan)" "She's alive!" "Alive!" "The bride of Frankenstein." "Friend?" "(strangled sound)" "Friend?" " Stand back." "Stand back." " (growls)" "She hate me." "Like others." " Look out!" "The lever!" " Get away from that lever!" "You'll blow us all to atoms." "Henry!" "Open the door!" "Henry!" " Get back!" "Get back!" " I won't unless you come!" "But I can't leave them!" "I can't!" "Yes, go!" "You live!" "Go!" "You stay." "We belong dead." "(growls)" "(hisses)" "Darling, darling." "Hello." "This is Scott MacQueen, and we're about to watch the perfect horror movie," "James Whale's 1935 Universal production of Bride of Frankenstein." "Wanting nothing to do with a sequel to his 1931 film Frankenstein," "James Whale responded to the inevitable with style, wit and production value." "He extracted the absolute best in concept and craft from his cast and technical staff." "Every department excels under a director who knew exactly the effect he wanted:" "An opera of the macabre, distilling ideas and fusing imagery of a myriad antecedents, instilling them with subtext and theme." "Mastery, control and purpose inform every frame of this remarkable film." "A stellar cast of largely British principals is amended at the bottom with "The Monster's Mate" played by... a question mark." "The servant walking Lord Byron's hounds is Irish actress Una O'Connor." "We'll meet her again in her principal role as Minnie, housekeeper of Castle Frankenstein." "This whimsical doubling foreshadows that of actress Elsa Lanchester." "In an hour or so, we'll meet Elsa as the monster's bride." "Here she is as Mary Godwin." "The cast list notwithstanding, she's not Mary Shelley yet." "The prologue was conceived by Whale and first written by Edmund Pearson." "Pearson created anachronisms, as he put it, "for the benefit of the censors"." "In historical reality, English poet Percy Shelley abandoned his wife Harriet and their two children to live abroad with his lover, Mary Godwin." "Mary bore their love child, William." "They wed only after Harriet's convenient suicide, coincident with the publication of Frankenstein in 1818 - its author also anonymous, like the cipher in the Universal cast list." "Originally, the prologue celebrated the naughty behaviour of its principals." ""We are all three infidels, scoffers at marriage ties, believing only in living fully and freely" stated Mary in dialogue cut from the prologue - along with lingering views of Elsa's décolletage." "When Mary refers to "such an audience", she doesn't mean her reading public, but her circle of friends." "Contract player Frank Lawton was considered to play Shelley." "David Niven tested for the part, but was rejected." "Screenwriter John Balderston worked the prologue into his second draft, but only in William Hurlbut's final script was the precision achieved that makes Bride of Frankenstein so memorable." "Eight writers worked on it, but the story and language of Bride of Frankenstein is ultimately due almost entirely to William Hurlbut and James Whale." "This shot of the funeral cortege was the original opening of Frankenstein, curiously still missing from prints today." "As originally recorded, Franz Waxman's music for the prologue ran 5¾ minutes, indicating that the sequence has been trimmed by nearly two minutes." "Waxman scored the prologue as salon music of the early 19th century, utilising strings and celeste to create a delicate minuet in A-B-C-A form:" "Statement, development, followed by a scherzo as the original picture's horrors are relived in flashback." "The scherzo is a minor-key desyncopated variation of the minuet." "At each depiction of the monster is sounded a nine-note ascending/descending chromatic run, patterned on the monster's growl." "It will recur as a danger motif several times in the score, usually in conjunction with a five-tone third-interval motif for the monster." "The motif that we heard in the main title is saved for Karloff's first entrance." "That was Torben Meyer being throttled by the monster - the only new footage in the flashback." "Meyer played the Danish tenant in Universal's Murders in the Rue Morgue." "Some thought the prologue immaterial." "Film editor Ted Kent argued for its complete elimination." "As the flashback ends, the demure 'A' section of the minuet returns." "The anticipatory mood is reflected as the violins play the minuet col legno, tapping the wood of their bows on the strings." "The metre slows, the musical phrase fails to complete, the key changes to minor with drawn strings." "In what period and place is this story occurring?" "Post-Tesla generators, telephonic electrical devices and 1930s marcelled hairstyles will coexist with a peasantry by Brueghel." "Burgomasters and serfs with Teutonic names like Hans and Karl speak in accents hailing from Glasgow, County Cork and Pasadena." "Quote: "I've taken the rest of the story far into the future and made use of developments which science will someday know," "100 years to come", said Mary Shelley in dialogue removed from the prologue, rationalising an alternate universe peppered with anachronisms." "Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado takes place in a Japan that is suspiciously like Victorian England." "In similar fashion, the English-born Whale has created a Goldstadt that is really a British never-never land." "Several 1935 press squibs actually stated that the locale for the picture is England." "In a contemporary interview, Whale explained." ""The whole of the theatre, both stage and screen, is unreal, and if, for 1½ hours, the audience can be transported into a strange atmosphere in which unnatural things happen, but appear to happen naturally and believably," "the object of the film producer is accomplished."" ""While the intention is a thrilling melodrama", states a production note," ""it is punctuated by the comedy of the burgomaster and the housekeeper, who voice the scepticism of the audience in the manner of The Invisible Man."" "Whale knew during the writing who would play these two." "Essentially reprising their roles from that 1933 film are Whale favourites EE Clive as the burgomaster and Una O'Connor as Minnie, the housekeeper." "The parts were written for these specific performers." "The unforgettable role of Dr Pretorius was apparently tailored for Claude Rains." "It is not known why Rains bowed out." "According to later studio memos, he declined the Basil Rathbone part in Son of Frankenstein because it was a horror picture." "Ernest Thesiger, another Whale favourite, filled the gap, dramatically changing the movie's orbit." "The old Baron Frankenstein, referred to here, is never mentioned again." "In the preview version, the news of Henry's alleged death did the old man in." "The baron wasn't shown, but the priest and altar boys attending last rites were, and they can still be found in one or two production stills." "The parents of Maria, the child drowned in the original film, are played by Reginald Barlow and Mary Gordon." "Michael Mark, the father in Frankenstein, was called Ludwig." "Reginald Barlow, here called Hans, appeared in the concurrent Werewolf of London as the estate caretaker, Timothy." "Upon reviewing the November 30th, 1934, shooting script," "Joseph Breen, the omnipotent censor of the Production Code Administration, wrote the studio "We counted ten separate scenes in which the monster either strangles or tramples people to death - this in addition to murders by secondary characters."" ""Such a great amount of slaughter is unwise, and we recommend earnestly that you do something about toning this down."" "Whale balked: "Kill them all." "Let Breen sort them out."" "Whale's first cut contained no less than 21 deaths either committed or alluded to." "After Breen's sorting, the casualty rate plummeted to a mere ten confirmed decedents." "Franz Waxman's famous five-note motif for the monster, usually played by brass, provides the backbone of the score, and will recur in various guises and developments, including flutter tonguing for danger and harmon mutes for comic effect." "As developed, it comments both on the creature and other characters' reactions to him." "Poor Mary Gordon is Hans' wife." "Her Mrs Hudson suffered for years the eccentricities of Basil Rathbone in the Sherlock Holmes films." "The Scottish-born actress is tossed into the cistern here by Boris Karloff, and would be throttled by Lon Chaney in The Mummy's Tomb." "She survived a rematch with Karloff in The Body Snatcher, only to see Boris bludgeon her wee doggie and steal her son's corpse." "That's Hollywood for you." "Jack Pierce brilliantly extrapolated Karloff's make-up in Bride, creating several stages of distress and regeneration, all in narrative continuity." "The wounded monster healed progressively." "Karloff seems fleshier because he is more padded than in the first film." "The need to speak means that he does not remove his dental plate this time, forfeiting the cadaverous sunken cheek." "Nor did Pierce paint him with as many hollows." "The hollow in the monster's cheek became an annoying grace note until, in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, it looked like Bela Lugosi's monster and Ilona Massey's heroine both sported duelling beauty marks." "Elizabeth, the true bride of Frankenstein, played by a 17-year-old Valerie Hobson - truly a child bride." "Whale would have liked Mae Clarke, his original, but her frail health by 1935 made this impossible." "D'Arcy Corrigan, who plays the morgue attendant in Murders in the Rue Morgue, delivers the bad news to Valerie." "He is flanked by the family of Whale's longtime companion David Lewis." "His mother, Fanny Levy, is the chubby peasant, his father, Pon Levy, the stout, bearded man." "David's sister, Leah Bishan, is the sweet-faced girl blinking back tears." "Leah's daughter recalls Uncle Jimmy helping the Levys survive the Depression with extra work in Bride, One More River and The Road Back." "How soon after Frankenstein was a sequel planned?" "According to Robert Florey, that film's disinvited director, almost immediately." "Florey submitted an unsolicited seven-page treatment, which was returned to him without comment in February 1932." "Frankenstein hit, a money machine, and Carl Laemmle Junior wanted more." "James Whale refused, finding the entire premise repellent." "Former newspaperman Tom Reed wrote a sequel in June and July 1933, floating random chunks of the Shelley novel into his own mindless stew." "The now-educated monster demands a mate, killing Elizabeth for body parts." "Henry destroys himself and his creatures." "The old baron, written as the grumpy Frederick Kerr from the first film, monopolises the first half of the script until the monster mercifully chokes him." "Then bad comedy with villagers, the bishop, a gay dance-instructor, take over." "Henry steals the legs of Frau von Hassenbagovitz from a pompous undertaker's embalming room, he ambulance-chases a train wreck to scavenge body parts, and steals the hydrocephalic head of a suicided circus giantess to build the bride." "A glimmer or two emerge from the dross to be retained - the monster seeing his reflection in a pool, his education in speech, the befriending of a blind man, the mate, the destruction of the lab," "and the thematic seed of religious piety." "Josef Berne and Morton Coyne prepared an independent treatment based on Reed's material that was equally uneventful." "By September 1933, Kurt Neumann was announced to direct, but the returns on The Invisible Man made Whale the obvious commercial - protesting - choice." ""They've had a script prepared", he told The Invisible Man's writer, RC Sherriff," ""and it stinks to heaven."" "Whale was preparing One More River with Sherriff, a property Whale was passionate about, but that made the Laemmles yawn." "A bargain was made:" "One for James, one for the Laemmles." "Whale resigned himself to the sequel." "Two original treatments were evolved independently by mystery writers Lawrence Blochman and Philip MacDonald, in December 1933." "Blochman's treatment seems partially inspired by Todd Browning's 1932 film Freaks." "Henry and Elizabeth, incognito, have joined a travelling carnival as puppeteers." "They re-enact the monster's drama with marionettes." "All the carnival oddities have spouses and lovers - even Emma, the lion tamer, who boasts about how she beats her husband even as she dallies with Fifi, the giantess." "Enter the monster, wanting a love match." "The bride is produced in a carnival wagon and the enraged monster dies in the jaws of Emma's lions." "Philip MacDonald's story was absolutely up to date, equally original as Blochman's and equally useless." "War clouds over Europe, and Henry has developed his delta death ray, that he wishes to sell to the League of Nations as a deterrent to war." "Henry has neglected his sickly wife Elizabeth, over whom family friend Victor Moritz is still spooning." "A nocturnal demonstration of the ray inadvertently revives the monster, and a second exposure gives him superhuman strength." "The monster plays with the apparatus' dials like a child, inadvertently raining death and destruction across Europe, decimating whole cities." "A remorseful Henry apologises to his creature, vaporises him with the ray, and then immolates himself in its beam." "It was written that Elizabeth's vision would be a classical grim reaper, a ghost of Christmas yet-to-come, bearing a strong whiff of the monster." "It would have been dangerous to go over the top so early on, with so many fancies yet to come." "Far better to drop the other shoe with the arrival of Dr Pretorius, a literal figure of death." "We're ready for our wake-up call, Dr P." "Promethean hubris drives the story - or this telling of it." "Henry rationalises his blasphemy by conjecturing that his actions are part of the divine plan:" "The devil didn't make him do it, God did." "Having created a shambling revenant with unpredictable powers," "Frankenstein refuses to take responsibility for its care or destruction." "Whale was a man of absolutely no religious convictions, according to his biographer, James Curtis." "It is fashionable to view the religious parable and Christ imagery in Bride of Frankenstein as mocking, and to attribute it to Whale's nonconformity." "This view assumes the fey Dr Pretorius is the director's absolute alter ego, and that the godless reprobate represents an alternative to the vulgar Philistines of Goldstadt." "As the movie unfolds, I will suggest that the story's thesis is larger." "His entrance here is yet another one of Whale's bravura stage entrances." "Several pages of dialogue, eliminated here, made it clear that this is an old acquaintance." "Pretorius had been Henry's teacher at school, passing on his forbidden Promethean knowledge." "Henry's indiscretions in monstermaking had been traced to the doctor, causing Pretorius to be sacked." "Pretorius also made it clear that the monster is most likely immortal." "The invisible man merely dreamt of walking into the holy of holies." "Dr Pretorius has done it, and stolen God's fire." "Like all worthy devils, Pretorius is magnetic." "He fascinates us with wit, intelligence, self-assurance." "He tempts us by giving voice to our worst impulses." "He controls destiny, irresponsibly and without consequence." "Disdainful of women, contemptuous of mankind and God, utterly self-absorbed, ingenuous about vice," "Pretorius is literally one hell of a guy." "He is the climax of a noble line of cinematic Mephistos that include Mr Scratch in All That Money Can Buy and Emil Jannings' primordial Mephistopheles in FW Murnau's Faust." "The return of Frankenstein malingered while Whale shot One More River and developed A Trip To Mars, which was ultimately abandoned." "He asked RC Sherriff to work on the sequel of Frankenstein, but Sherriff refused, as he said, "to spend his summer writing pulp"." "Whale conceived a prologue with Mary Shelley as a frame, and Edmund Pearson wrote the earliest treatment." "Whale hired John Balderston, coauthor of the Dracula and Frankenstein plays, and coauthor of the film The Mummy." "Now Hollywood's horror specialist, Balderston would contribute to such films as Mad Love, Dracula's Daughter and Mark of the Vampire." "Raised in the Quaker faith, John Balderston balanced grim brutality and equally grim religious moralising in his stories." "He worked through June and July 1934 on a workmanlike but unmagical script that supplies a road map but no gas." "Rough narrative lines are there, but no spirit." "Elsa Lanchester is indicated as the player for Mary Shelley and the monster's mate." "The soul of the picture arrived with William Hurlbut in November 1934." "Born in Illinois in 1886, Hurlbut had been a New York playwright for 30 years." "He arrived at Universal as a dialogue writer - on pictures such as The Cat Creeps - when talkies came in." "Trained as an illustrator, background in theatre, a confirmed bachelor," "Hurlbut and Whale shared much common ground." "Whale wanted to treat the film as a hoot, and he found the idea of a female monster delirious." "He preferred the title "Bride of Frankenstein"." "With Hurlbut, Whale re-engineered the story on fanciful, witty lines." "Dr Pretorius, his miniature creations, Minnie, and the burgomaster, were born." "Balderston's piety was rather suspect." "In his finale, the monster jealously kills Henry and the mate." "In an unbelievably maudlin scene, a priest, Father Gerard, convinces the monster to accept God - and indeed, he proves his love by dispatching the hapless brute with a lightning bolt." "Deus ex machina." "With Hurlbut, Whale developed the spiritual subtext into something meaningful and special." "To a new world of gods and monsters." "The perfect line, the perfect staging:" "English gin in a chemist's retort, as drunken science toasts itself." "The cabinet of Dr Pretorius." "He has donned a medieval skullcap, an archaic fashion associated with alchemy, as depicted in Murnau's Faust and Paul Wegener's The Golem." "More like black magic than science." "Pretorius is wardrobed in black, with high, white, nearly clerical collar and cuffs, like an English country vicar." "The skullcap makes the image discordant:" "The Reverend Dr Pretorius, High Priest of Satanic Arts." "Special effects men John Fulton and David Horsley shot the little people over two days in full-scale jars against black velvet." "This was meticulously lined up to match the production plates of Thesiger, Clive and the practical jars." "The film, or foreground plate, of the tiny people was rotoscoped, then matted into the background plate." "As usual with John Fulton, the optical work is flawless." "Joan Woodbury, formerly Nana Martinez, was at the start of her career portraying the queen." "In short order, she was a busy B-picture ingénue." "The king is the image of Henry Vlll, 16th-century English sovereign." "Henry defied the Catholic Church to divorce Catherine of Aragon." "The rutting monarch is portrayed by English actor Arthur S Byron." "No, not Sir Joseph Whemple in The Mummy - that was Arthur "Pops" Byron." "Elsa Lanchester's husband, Charles Laughton, had just copped an Academy Award playing Henry for Alex Korda." "Norman Ainsley is the drowsy archbishop." "The religious parody is probably institutional, not canonical." "The screenplay even indicated the cleric's mitre askew at a "deliberately nonepiscopal angle"." "Peter Shaw plays the devil - not as a cloven-hoofed satyr, as in the script, but as an urbane Mephisto." "Franz Waxman provides an off-kilter quotation from Faust by Charles Gounod." "He would again write musical miniatures for Todd Browning's The Devil-Doll." "Monte Montague is the stunt double as the mini monarch is airlifted to his jar." "If you slow down the soundtrack, you can hear an engineer say "And the king gets picked up by the ears."" "Montague was the sleepy policeman in The Invisible Man." "Bride received its only Academy Award nomination for Best Sound Recording." "Kansas DeForest plays the tiny toe-dancer." "Josephine McKim, in blonde wig and fins, was a 1932 Olympic swim champion." "She was also Maureen O'Sullivan's nude body double in the erotic underwater pas de deux with Johnny Weissmuller in 1934's Tarzan and His Mate." "In the right front bottle, seen from behind, is Billy Barty as the baby, seated in a highchair, rending a flower to bits and waving his rattle." "Whale went over the top here, and wisely eliminated the main business." "The tyke is described as "looking like it might develop into Boris Karloff."" ""I think this baby will grow into something worth watching", quipped Pretorius." "The censors softened Pretorius's reference to scripture as "fairy tales"" "to "Bible stories"." "Thesiger restores blasphemy with his inimitable reading of the line." "A book novelisation was prepared in England in 1936 by author Michael Harrison, writing as Michael Egremont." "Harrison recalls consulting the script and a single screening - but once was enough." "In his story, Harrison coyly enunciates the flamboyant homosexuality that Thesiger brings to the character." "Quote: "I disobey the Biblical injunction 'be fruitful and multiply'."" ""'You"' he tells Henry, "'have the choice of natural means, but as for me, I am afraid there is no course open to me but the scientific method.' He chuckled throatily."" "Curtain down on act one." "Bride of Frankenstein has three neat acts, each lasting about 25 minutes." "Karloff portrays the monster as a lost soul desperately seeking contact with humanity and desiring friendship." "He's met by a population that responds with nothing but cruelty and anger." "Whale's brilliance in cutting is evident here." "Cutting back to the hand already over the mouth, truncating the action for effect." "Among the villagers is John George, a diminutive actor whose stature - or lack of it - made him a fixture as a decorative gargoyle in pictures like Babes in Toyland, East of Java and Trick for Trick." "You'll spot him again, pushing to the front of the crowd before the dissolve." "The sets for the earlier forest scenes are lush with waterfalls, grass and fir trees." "Here, as the monster is pursued by the mob," "Whale, himself a former stage designer, has instructed art director Charles D Hall to provide an expressionistic forest of the dead - dirt, rocks, leafless trees like upright telephone poles, all the better to play the monster's crucifixion." "Whale is often incorrectly called expressionistic " "Whale used expressionism when it suited him, as in this sequence and the "OI' Man River" number in Show Boat." "Bride, if anything, is rococo, a robust co-mingling of baroque, gothic, the decorative, the expressionistic and the derivative." "Dwight Frye, body snatcher to the stars, is first glimpsed leaning against a tree." "David Lewis's sister is again kibitzing with the rabble." "There's Dwight." "Mr Levy, wearing spectacles and leaning on his cane, has just darted behind EE Clive." "The point is not that the monster is Christ." "In Christian theology, Jesus is the redeemer." "His death and resurrection contain the promise of eternal life." "The monster is the son of man, a gross parody of all that is human, lacking the divine spark and therefore a mockery of the divine." "Whale was an ironist, not a parodist." "He doesn't crucify the monster to suggest that Golgotha was a cosmic joke, he punches our buttons by inverting a fundamental tradition of Western culture:" "The monster, the son of man, is resurrected from the dead, then crucified." "Strangely enough, the film would open on Good Friday, 1935." "Everything about the look of the film is stylised." "Nowhere do we see a natural sky." "With glowering, painted skies, it's as if a thunderstorm is always looming." "Here, the sky is filled with an architectural matte painting by Jack Cosgrove and Russell Lawson." "These are the only back-lot exteriors in the picture, tightly composed on the German village set from All Quiet on the Western Front." "The monster's jailer here, who gives EE Clive some lip, is Charlie Murphy, curator of the Universal zoo in the early '30s and a frequent bit player in action pictures for Universal and Republic." "Thanks to Breen, much of the monster's rampage was cut - actually improving the picture." "The fatter film contained a vignette in the morgue, followed by an inquest sequence where Minnie and others admit not actually witnessing any murders." "The pompous burgomaster is insisting there is no monster when the creature plucks him through a window and cuffs him about the head." "Just as Minnie was spared at the ruined mill, the burgomaster is a fool figure, the voice of the audience - he can be humbled, but he must not be killed." "Fleeing in the crowd, we then met Auntie and Uncle Glutz, played by Tempe Pigott and Gunnis Davis, and their nephew, played by Dwight Frye in his amalgamated state." "At their house, nephew killed his uncle and stole his hoard, blaming it on the monster." "The scene closed as nephew pondered the convenience of a scapegoat and mused that the monster might soon visit auntie." "The communion girl who speaks is Helen Parrish, sister of film director Robert Parrish." "Helen grew up to become a leading lady in Three Smart Girls Grow Up and was Boris Karloff's ingénue in You'll Find Out in 1940." "A shot of Frieda's mother carrying the body was cut by the censor." "Gossiping with Una O'Connor is David Lewis's mother, Fanny Levy, earning her seven and a half dollars a day extra-player's pay." "Poor old Newman has been hacked to death by the monster." "That's Walter Brennan handling the murder weapon." "Mr and Mrs Newman's moans were dubbed in later to lessen the official body count." "Perhaps they aren't dead yet, but, in Monty Python fashion, are feeling much better after the dissolve." "The Gypsy camp was added during reshoots in April to bridge the deletions in the village." "Maurice Black plays the Gypsy man, and Elspeth Dudgeon is his sour mother." "She's made up to evoke Eva Moore's crusty matriarch in The Old Dark House." "Elspeth also appeared in that film - billed as John Dudgeon - as the 102-year-old family patriarch." "Whale used her again in Show Boat and The Great Garrick." "She is memorable as the titular villain in a loony 1938 horror comedy for Warner Bros, Sh/ The Octopus." "Elspeth played the octopus, not the imperative, and her transformation as the grandmother from hell was an unsung high point of '30s horror movies." "In a sequence inspired by Shelley's novel, the monster finds refuge with a blind hermit." "Whale had shut the picture down February 19th to March 2nd, 1935, waiting for OP Heggie to finish a picture at RKO Radio Pictures." "Whale was on dangerous ground here - with the censor and the audience." "One false step, and this delicately charged material could explode into maudlin sentimentality, ecclesiastical heresies or baggy-pants burlesque." "The integrity of this performance from Heggie was crucial, or we would have had Mel Brooks 45 years ahead of schedule." "The hermit is a saintly figure, aged, bearded, possessed of inner sight, deliberately wardrobed to suggest a New Testament figure." "Breen had cautioned Whale that his script contained references to Dr Frankenstein that "compare him to God, and which compare his creation of the monster to God's creation of man."" ""All such references should be eliminated."" "Craftily, Whale and Hurlbut retained these as shooting drew nearer." "Three weeks before production, Whale helpfully reminded Breen of his oversight in his last communication:" ""There are points about God, entrails, immortality and mermaids, which you did not bring up again, and I am very anxious to have the script meet with your approval in every detail."" "Greg Mank asked Valerie Hobson late in her life if she could pinpoint why Bride of Frankenstein remained so popular." "She replied "Karloff is so moving, like one of the great clowns who make you cry."" ""I think this was the secret of its enduring success."" "Franz Waxman asked for Clifford Vaughan as his orchestrator specifically because of Vaughan's expertise with the organ." "The instrument is associated with sacred music, evident in this solo rendition of Schubert's "Ave Maria"." "Oliver Wallace, later a mainstay of Disney's music department, was the session player on a Wurlitzer-style theatre organ." "Elsewhere, the organ is used for profane colour, notably in the danse macabre of the crypt sequence and in multiple renditions of the bride's theme." "Vaughan also orchestrated for staff composers Edward Ward and Heinz Roemheld in 1934-35." "He was also a fine composer, contributing the memorable main title and recap music to Universal's first Flash Gordon serial." "Film editor Ted Kent maintained that he executed the glowing crucifix behind this scene all on his own." "Whale didn't much care for it, but let it stay." "Symbols of Christian ritual are hidden in plain sight." "When the monster says "Bread good, wine good", he is really reading the Eucharist." "This is his Last Supper, complete with the holy sacraments of bread and wine." "Soon the Romans will come for him." "Perhaps this explains Dr Pretorius's otherwise inexplicable name:" "From "praetor", a Roman magistrate." "Like his namesake, Pretorius is his own law, meting out life and death." "Thesiger would play a genuine praetor in the CinemaScope epic The Robe." "In teaching the monster the pleasures of a cigar," "Whale lets the creature indulge in the director's own trademark habit." "When fire threatened to engulf Whale's home in the early 1950s, his cigars were the one thing he cared to rescue, and stood by, calmly puffing, as he watched the blaze." "Karloff thought giving the monster speech was stupid, and destroyed whatever impact he had." "He argued against it." "Karloff was right, for speech removed the alien remoteness of the creature." "But the monster could now no longer be the totemic black Injun of the first film." "He had to be an evolving character and interact with the others, or he would become the lifeless prop Karloff sensed coming into being after Son of Frankenstein." "Universal publicists refused to believe the novelty was gone." "A New York Times squib reported that, during production," "Laemmle insisted that Karloff wear a veil over his monstrous features when walking to and from the stage - the same gambit they had milked in 1931." "The Times reporter was sceptical - who, in 1935, didn't know already what the monster looked like?" "The melody being fiddled is an original by Franz Waxman called "Children's Theme", that will be quoted later at the end of this sequence." "The hunters - on the left, John Carradine, and Robert Adair." "Whale had used Carradine in a small part in The Invisible Man." "In the 1940s, Carradine added the role of Dracula to his considerable résumé." "In late life, Carradine raised eyebrows by insisting that he had turned down the role of the Frankenstein monster in 1931." "Karloff emits the warning growl which Franz Waxman picked up on as the monster's secondary danger-motif." "Shortly, the monster will stumble into a group of children and be posed before an icon of Jesus Christ." "He beseeches the children, and is again rejected by humanity." "Marilyn Harris, the drowned Maria of the first film, is the children's leader." "Also fleeing in the gaggle is child actress Carmencita Johnson." "Whale upgraded Marilyn's silent bit with one word of dialogue, making the part a higher-paying speaking role." "He would use Marilyn again in Show Boat and The Road Back." "Balderston's July 23rd script had the angry monster wrestle and destroy a stone angel in the cemetery - literally a fallen angel." "Hurlbut's shooting script had the monster come upon a crucified Nazarene, etched against a glowering sky." "Seeing it as a living figure, tortured as he has been, the monster toppled the effigy and attempted to free it from the cross." "The Breen office told Whale in no uncertain terms to find another monument." "Whale salvaged the ghost of the intention by including the unmolested Christ icon in the margin." "Censor cuts in Frankenstein perverted the poignant encounter with a little girl into an act of paedophilic depravity." "As if Pretorius, the burgomaster and Minnie jointly ran the Production Code Administration, the most resonant Christian image was twisted into an act of godlessness." "Casting sheets show that Dwight Frye was originally cast for his part here as Ghoul Number One." "A screenplay anachronism retained Fritz, the hunchback assistant who had been killed in the first film." "Dwight Frye Jr recalls that Whale helped his father by creating roles, and Frye's Karl is an amalgam of four characters in the Hurlbut script " "Pretorius's servant, first Ghoul, Nephew Glutz and Fritz." "This is why Frye has two different partners." "Neil Fitzgerald, here in the crypt, is Rudy, aka Ghoul Number Two." "Ted Billings, as Ludwig, will help to fly the kites at the climax." "Dwight Frye's reading of the tombstone gives the story a definite anchor in time." "He tells us the girl died in 1899." "Corruption is complete, and now, years later, only her bones remain." "As Universal's press book stated in 1935, "The time of the story is the present" - though clearly an alternate universe." "Déjeuner sur le crypte." "The drunken doctor blows smoke in the face of death, just as Henry tossed dirt at the grim reaper in the original film." "Franz Waxman titled this cue "Danse Macabre", using organ and padded xylophone to mock the skeletal décor in three-quarter time." "This is the role of a lifetime for Ernest Thesiger." "A true eccentric, his performance draws much from his private persona." "Valerie Hobson remembered him as a terribly sweet man with a good heart." ""I don't think he had a very strong male approach to things,"" "she told historian Greg Mank." ""He was one of the very first people to make, almost, camp fun."" ""He did it as a serious thing, you know."" ""Sort of the arched eyebrow and arched nostril."" "Elsa Lanchester recalled him as weird, strange and acid-tongued." "Thesiger opened in the play A Sleeping Clergyman at the Theatre Guild, New York, on October 8th, 1934." "When it closed after 40 performances, he was able to train west to join the cast of Bride after the New Year." "Reading Pretorius's dialogue, it is easy to hear Claude Rains' brushed-velvet tones and imagine the cynical, twinkling bemusement with which he played Captain Renault in Casablanca." "That same dialogue plays very differently when enunciated by the man who, in The Old Dark House, spoke the phrase "Have a potato"" "and endowed it with seven levels of malevolence." "Thesiger's best film roles are all macabre." "Less well-known than The Old Dark House and The Ghoul are his parts as Marley's undertaker in the Alistair Sim version of Scrooge, the asthmatic industrial tycoon, swathed in furs, in The Man in the White Suit," "a 19th-century wraith who must release his dead lover's soul from the body of a possessed girl in the 1948 British thriller A Place of One's Own, and the milk-toast Mr Hoover, the silk-stocking killer of the 1938 Warner Bros British production They Drive by Night." "Pretorius's preoccupation with the female being radiates an unhealthy, prurient interest." "As the monster realises the implication of the word "wife", Thesiger's glance suggests that Pretorius will be a most interested spectator on the honeymoon." "Whale had a good film editor in Ted Kent, but Kent was the first to credit his director with pinpointing precisely where and when to cut, both to punch dialogue and to catch the eye." "Notice these opposing shots of Thesiger and Clive, each pushing in to close-ups." "This symmetrical pairing of shots will be seen again in the creation sequence." "Another bravura entrance here, as the monster is revealed at the door." "The successively closer cuts play on our memory of the first film and repeat its impact." "Whale reveals his strange characters in this fashion frequently " "Rains in The Invisible Man, Karloff in The Old Dark House, even Colin Clive in One More River." "This time the monster is the master, as the "sit down" tutorial from the first film is inverted, with Henry as pupil." "In Hurlbut's script, Elizabeth is stolen off-screen." "Valerie and Boris were to appear together for only one shot in the cave." "Whale realised he had omitted the beauty-and-the-beast ritual, and seized this opportunity to make, not a parody, but a reprise, of Elizabeth's symbolic rape in the first film." "The setting is again the bedroom, but with Frau Frankenstein no longer a Fräulein, the bed is less functional furniture than associative backdrop to Elizabeth's abduction by her robber bridegroom." "Here's another example of Whale and Hurlbut's good theatrical instincts." "As written, Pretorius and Dr Frankenstein remain together during this episode." "Pretorius merely shrugs at the suggestion that he is behind the abduction." "On the set, Whale contrived for Pretorius to make another grand entrance, smashing the bric-a-brac while the camera dollies in to a low angle to punch the impact of the moment." "Here's another Whale trademark:" "Moving his camera through the wall of a set." "The watchtower set from the first film is revisited, with a crossbeam now spanning the staircase - just in case one feels like hanging oneself from a convenient rafter." "The mordant pleasantries about slimy steps and the charms of the house are ad-libs." "The next four minutes are mainly the contribution of John Balderston." "The immediate necessity of a fresh heart is a full incident retained from his script." "Pretorius's line to Henry about "once upon a time being burnt at the stake as wizards for the experiment" is rather ingenuous." "He fails to consider that kidnapping, grave-robbing, corpse mutilation and murdering young girls for their body parts - have I forgotten anything?" " Might merit the gallows, if not the stake." "This line was spoken in Balderston's script by a professor of anatomy, while energising dead frog parts with a galvanic battery." "In his screenplay, Balderston shamelessly rehashed the medical-school business of the first film, even to reviving the deceased hunchback Fritz." "Apparently nothing is impossible when your boss is Dr Frankenstein." "Fritz procures a desiccated specimen, enraging Henry, who demands a fresh one, and offers the 1,000-crown bounty." "Fritz obliges - in the Great Depression people would do anything for money." "Having appeared in every crowd scene in the film for seven and a half dollars a day, it seemed the only way to get rid of David Lewis' sister, Leah Bishan, was to kill her." "But it was worth it for Leah - records show that the Goldstadt street victim was a 50-dollar turn." "Hardly 1,000 crowns, but not to be sneezed at in 1935." "One myth that has been repeated over the years held that the fresh heart for the bride was at one time intended to be Elizabeth's." "A still of Dwight Frye hovering near Valerie Hobson with a knife, and the bride's instantaneous attraction to Henry, have been cited as proofs." "At no time was this ever considered." "More's the pity that it wasn't - it's in tune with the story, and Elizabeth died anyway in the final cataclysm - at least, until the preview." "The monster's recitation of the work ethic to Henry is also courtesy of Balderston." "Cinematographer John Mescall had first worked for Whale on The Invisible Man before filming By Candlelight, The Kiss Before the Mirror," "Bride of Frankenstein and Show Boat for the director." "Mescall was an alcoholic." "On the set he was efficient and produced luminous work - provided that he made it to the set, which the studio ensured by sending a car daily." "Despite a good rapport, Whale finally sacked Mescall for drunkenness on the set of the much-troubled The Road Back." "By the late '50s, he was working for Roger Corman, and ended his days on skid row." "His work on Bride ranks it as one of the most exquisitely photographed films ever." "In a 1935 interview with Movie Makers, magazine of the Amateur Cinema League," "Mescall spoke of his use of Rembrandt lighting and asserted that, despite the greasepaint Jack Pierce applied, the monster was never intended to be a jolly green giant, but "a dead-white corpse."" "With variations, Rembrandt lighting is used throughout - a hard and contrasty light, with deep, rich shadows and brilliant highlights." "It involves neither a straight crosslight nor a flat light from the front, but a combination of the two, with the light originating from a point in front and to one side of the objects to be photographed." "This tends to impart a roundness to the features, and this pseudo-stereoscopic effect is heightened by having a dark background behind the bright side of the face, and vice versa." ""It was our desire to maintain an eerie, mysterious atmosphere."" ""Supplementary lights were projected from odd angles, especially for Karloff."" ""Many settings were filled with dark shadows."" ""The sets themselves had distorted walls, involving many angles and offsets."" ""In scenes in which only the monster appeared, the camera, with a short-angle lens, was placed low and comparatively close to the subject, and thus was gained the impression of a distorted figure and unusual height."" ""In contrast, we placed the camera at a high elevation in photographing the rascally Pretorius, and thus achieved the effect of a bulging cranium."" ""To give the effect of deadness, Karloff's make-up was blue-green in colour, and the light was projected through blue filters."" ""When other characters appeared with him, the make-ups of the others were pink or reddish in tone, and lights of a corresponding shade had to be trained on them, while the blue lights must be shielded from them."" "The laboratory scenes are patterned in equal parts on sequences from two silent films produced in Europe." "They are the creation of the female robot in Fritz Lang's 1927 Metropolis, filmed in Germany, and the medieval climax of the 1926 Rex Ingram film The Magician, filmed in France." "Kenneth Strickfaden built the electrical apparatus." ""I got my start in high school from my interest in science" he said." ""Otherwise, I might have been a teenage werewolf."" "His high-voltage Art-Deco assemblages - all sizzle and no steak - are the original light show, a defining image of science fiction." "Mrs Strickfaden didn't think much of horror pictures. "She's no fan" he said." ""I have to remind her that she lives in a house built and paid for by Frankenstein."" "Universal's publicity claimed, after the fact, that an intense hunt had been mounted to engage the bride." "The exhibitor's trade magazine, Universal Weekly, named a few also-rans:" "Brigitte Helm, the malevolent female robot from Metropolis," "Phyllis Brooks, a fashion model just edging her way into supporting roles, and Arletta Duncan, a Universal bit player who had been Mae Clarke's maid of honour in Frankenstein." "Poor Arletta - always a bridesmaid, never a bride." "But Whale knew who he wanted, and Elsa Lanchester's name, with a question mark, is prominent on the cast page of Balderston's first draft of June 9th, 1934." "It's still there six weeks later in the July 23rd script, only now Elsa is indicated as both Mary Shelley and the mate." "Ted Kent's montage for the creation sequence is as artistically valid as anything by Sergei Eisenstein - and it won't give you an urge to take up collective farming." "It was noted in the 1970s that the first three notes of the bride's musical theme are the same as the first three notes of the song "Bali Hai" from South Pacific." "By the 1990s, this casual observation became conflated into an urban legend that had Franz Waxman receiving a hefty settlement from Oscar Hammerstein." "The Waxman archives confirm that no litigation occurred." "Franz would hardly sue the librettist of a Richard Rodgers composition, and there are, after all, only eight notes in the diatonic scale." "Waxman's score for Fritz Lang's 1933 French production Liliom for Fox Europa caught Whale's ear - particularly the ethereal music for the heaven sequence, with its airy colouring of celeste and ondes Martenot, an early electronic instrument." "Mere days before production started on January 2nd," "Whale and Waxman met at a Christmas party." "Whale explained that nothing in the story would be resolved, everyone would die, and offered Waxman the job if he would give him an unresolved musical score." "The orchestra for the Bride sessions was conducted by Constantin Bakaleinikoff." "Session photographs show 32 players on the recording stage, 14 of whom are violinists." "Orchestration sheets reveal that at its largest the orchestra had 40 players." "Waxman music appeared memorably in Universal's Flash Gordon serials." "Cues from his score have been recorded by Charles Gerhardt and Erich Kunzel." "In 1993, Kenneth Alwyn conducted the first substantial recording of the nearly complete score." "Waxman's use of timpani here echoes the heartbeat of the monster bride." "Boris's monster in the first film looked like triage at an auto wreck, his face and torso swathed in bandages, naked legs truncating in size 16, triple-E foot splints." "The script called for the mate to give the effect of an Egyptian mummy, and this was realised exactly, including leg bindings." "Will the bride be beautiful or ghastly?" "Whale fools us with quick, progressively closer cuts, deliberately non-matching, alternating from diffuse to crisp." "He even has the actress' mouth stuffed with wadding to distort and swell her features for one flash cut." "Dr Pretorius, bridesmaid to the bride." "Franz Waxman provides wedding bells." "The script described Elsa's 'do' as "curled close to her head, hanging straight and dark on either side."" "Keeping to the mummy idea," "Whale and Jack Pierce memorably designed this Nefertiti number." "Lanchester's own hair is marcelled and swept back on a wire cage." "She looks like she has stuck her finger in a socket." "The white electric bolts from her temples add the final exclamation points." "Monster coiffure would never be the same." "Elsa's streaks and tips set a fashion craze - for Rafaela Ottiano in The Devil-Doll," "Ramsay Ames in The Mummy's Ghost," "Humphrey Bogart in The Return of Doctor X, even Boris Karloff himself in The Walking Dead." "Elsa Lanchester told Greg Mank "Jack Pierce did really feel like he made these people, like he was a god who created human beings."" "Lanchester elaborated in her memoirs:" ""He had his own sanctum sanctorum, and as you entered you did not 'go in', you 'entered'."" ""He said 'Good morning' first."" ""If I spoke first, he glared and slightly showed his upper teeth."" ""He would be dressed in a full hospital doctor's operating outfit."" ""At five in the morning, this made me dislike him intensely."" "Another baroque camera angle, with a short lens to keep the bride distorted." "No one can explain the presence of this lever - unless it's the lever to heaven." "Lanchester said she cultivated her hiss by observing angry swans at Regent's Park in London." "The Production Code Administration saw Whale's original cut on March 20th and demanded changes." "Subsequently, the picture was previewed at 92 minutes on April 6th, and in this form reviewed by the Hollywood Reporter." "Breen approved it on April 15th." "Mere days before the April 19th, San Francisco, Good Friday opening," "Whale relented on the script's "positively final fade-out", and reshot the ending so that Henry and Elizabeth would live." "Yes, there was going to be a Son of Frankenstein." "Waxman's unresolved musical ending now had a coda, cracked from the creation cue." "James Whale's biographer, James Curtis, tells us that Whale had the last laugh." "Taking friends to a revival showing in the late 1940s, the director was snickering at his ironic creation when an irate moviegoer whipped around in her seat." ""If you don't like the show" she commanded, "you can damn well leave."" "65 years later, no one in the audience is leaving."