Over the past few years, a surprising number of filmmakers have seemingly said to themselves, “you know what this world needs? A fresh take on Frankenstein.” The latest incarnation of this wave began with Poor Things back in 2023, with Lisa Frankenstein, Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, and now Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! following in quick succession. But where The Bride! “wants so desperately to be novel and provocative that it forgets to offer anything of substance,” as Inverse’s Hoai-Tran Bui writes, the original revisionist Frankenstein film smuggled complex ideas about gender and sexuality into a cash-grab sequel whose director had to be talked into taking the job.
A WWI veteran who got his start in the theater, James Whale’s career in Hollywood really took off when his adaptation of Frankenstein became a hit for Universal Pictures in the fall of 1931. In the years that followed, he alternated between horror films and more straightforward dramas and rom-coms; early in his career, Whale had directed multiple projects about “The Great War,” and he was worried about being pigeonholed again, this time as a “horror director.” And so Whale turned down Universal’s initial offer for a Frankenstein sequel, saying that the script “[stunk] to high heaven” and that he’d “squeezed the idea dry” on the first film.
