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Crypt Creature Double Feature: The Monster & The Bride
- Niomi Dylan Sass
- 3 days ago
- 12 min read
Written by Niomi Dylan Sass
Who is more monstrous, the creature causing harm or the person who created it?
In this Halloween Blog, I will be giving a summary and analysis of two movies that solidified two horror characters that still hold their legendary status, over 90 years later. The first movie is Frankenstein (1931), directed by James Whale, written by John L. Balderston and Peggy Webling. The second movie is Bride of Frankenstein (1935), directed by James Whale, written by William Hurlbut and John L. Balderston, and both movies are based on the 1818 novel written by Mary Shelley. I’ll be jumping between two text styles to differentiate between the summary and the analysis portions.
FRANKENSTEIN (1931)
A brilliantly mad scientist, Henry Frankenstein, is a man with science coursing through his veins. He possesses an unquenchable thirst for the formula of life itself. Through Frankenstein’s own image, he molded and created a man, seeking to play the part of God. Henry is equipped intellectually and owns a laboratory that is adequately prepared for executing his grand plan. All this madman needs now is enough body parts to strew together meticulously to form a walking and breathing creature. Instead, he created a MOooooOOOoonsterrrr.
Henry’s mentor and his fiancée, Elizabeth, come to check on him at his laboratory because of how involved he has been in his work. The sleep-deprived scientist assures his soon-to-be wife that he is okay and will be completing his experiment soon. She takes some comfort in this and heads back to their manor, still terribly worried about his mental state.
His mentor, assistant, and he have set up everything, and the experiment is now ready to begin. Flashes of lightning are sent throughout the equipment, activating the heart within the creature's body. It gets very quiet when a groan is let out. It wasn’t Henry, his assistant, or mentor. It was the creature! “It’s moving, it’s alive, it’s alive, it’s alive, it’s alive, IT’S ALIVE!”
Later, his mentor starts to grill him about Henry's creation. Henry tries to justify his actions by inquiring where would humanity be if some individuals didn’t try and find out what else lies beyond. Henry says that the creature’s brain just needs some time to develop, and his mentor should be complacent since the brain he used for his creation was taken from his laboratory. His mentor let him know that the brain that was stolen from his lab belonged to the body of a criminal when they were alive.
We see the creature being held downstairs. He has a realization that he has a fear of fire, and the mad scientist's assistant, Fritz, uses this against the creature to torment him. Fritz whips him and abuses him, which starts to rile up the creature. Henry comes down with the doctor, and he tells him to kill it, but Henry chooses to tranquilize the creature instead. Later, the monster is met with the doctor trying to end his reanimated life while he was unconscious, and the creature kills him first right before the doctor could.
The creature escaped from where he was hidden and found himself next to a river. A friendly little girl, Maria, was there picking flowers, and she asked the creature if she wanted to play with him. She shows him how to play and how her flowers can float in the river, turning them into a boat. He plays with her shortly, then picks her up and throws her in the river.
It cuts to the wedding of Henry Frankenstein and Elizabeth, where the creature ends up finding himself at. He sees Elizabeth and attacks her, but thankfully, she is unharmed, physically, at least. The wedding is now on an indefinite pause until Henry can properly figure out how to deal with what he created. During this time, an angry mob begins to form because Maria’s father brings her lifeless body into town to show everyone what The Monster did.
Frankenstein and his Monster find themselves in an old, tattered windmill where they face off with each other. The creature was able to get his hands on Henry, and when he did, the creature launched his creator off the top of the windmill. With the mob right outside, witnessing the events transpiring. They quickly used their torches to burn the windmill to the ground with the creature inside.
What we see is a story of a brand new life being created by a man trying to play the role of God. Henry Frankenstein and his assistant Fritz weren’t exactly getting the different parts needed for this experiment unlawfully. They dug up a recently deceased man’s grave, cut down the body of another man that hung himself, and stole a brain from the scientist’s mentor. Already bringing a bad omen into the life he is attempting to create.
In the success of Henry’s experiment, the House of Frankenstein was born. Even though the brain that was used in the creature's body was from a full-grown adult, it seemed to regain its adolescence when reanimated. The creature was unable to speak and seemed unaware of life around him because he was a brand-new soul experiencing it for the first time.
I believe that he could have been taught to become more docile instead of harmful. However, he was only responding to everyone's reaction when coming in contact with him, in most scenarios. He doesn’t get violent until Fritz begins to torment him, and his creator has him chained up. If this were done to an actual person, it would break their spirit and turn them into something monstrous from trying to protect themselves.
Now you're probably thinking, well, if he’s not a monster, then why did he throw the little girl into the lake? We can go back to the infantilism of a brain being restarted in a new body. This was a sad case of Monkey See, Monkey Do. The child was throwing flowers into the lake, showing the creature that they can float, and his intrusive thoughts won that battle. He wanted to see if the little girl could float like the flowers, and when he realized that she couldn't, he panicked and ran away.
The other people the creature ended up killing and harming in this film were directly in self-defense. The doctor was trying to kill him while he was unconscious, so he reacted accordingly. Henry was trying to eliminate the thing that he created with his own two hands, and he stopped him from succeeding in that endeavor. We can see that when he attacks Elizabeth, he doesn’t harm her and only tries to get her to quiet down her screams of terror. I think he was infatuated with a pretty lady, and when she saw the creature, she got frightened, and it scared him back.
I’m not saying that the creature should have killed anyone, but I don’t think it’s fair to place the blame solely on him. He didn’t ask to be created, and once alive, not many openly invite death to overtake them. I like to refer to Frankenstein's creation as the creature because it wasn’t until how the negative way society treated him that turned him into a monster. I think Henry Frankenstein is the true monster in this story, and he should have been liable for every person’s death in that movie, including his own demise. As we’re going to see in the sequel to this film, if the creature had been treated differently from his awakening breath, then I think he could have refrained from being turned into a murderer.
BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1935)
A beautiful woman with the fiercest eyebrows is surrounded by a group of her peers having a conversation about the success of her first book, Frankenstein. This is a depiction of Mary Shelly, and the fictitious version of her is being questioned as to why she wrote her book. She replies, “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.” Mary lets her acquaintances know that wasn’t the end of her story at all.
It picks back up at the wreckage of the now burnt-down windmill. The father of the little girl, Maria, who previously drowned, is there with his wife, and they are the last two of the dwindling mob. The dad is there to make sure that the creature is destroyed in the fire, but ends up falling into the underneath of the windmill. That’s when we see that the creature has survived, and he then kills Maria’s parents. First, he drowned the dad, next, climbed up from the fathoms below, and then threw the mom furiously down into the abyss.
The rest of the mob had carried Henry Frankenstein's body back to the manor, where Elizabeth was present, allowing her to mourn her husband. He ends up still being alive, barely. Henry and Elizabeth have a moment together to talk about what just transpired, and Frankenstein is even more intrigued with trying to create life, while she is traumatized from the events.
Dr. Pretorius comes to visit Henry, and he suggests quite enthusiastically that they should work together to probe the mysteries of how life is created. The doctor tells Henry to go back to his laboratory with him so he can show his creations. Once they get there, the doctor reveals miniature people who breathed life. He made a queen, a king, an archbishop, a devil, a dancer, and a siren, all small enough to fit into jars. It frightens Henry, just a little, as he refutes science has anything to do with this and compares it to black magic. The doctor does some of his best convincing to get a Frankenstein x Pretorius collaboration, but Henry remains skeptical.
The creature finds himself by a river and goes to drink water when he catches a glimpse of his reflection staring back at him. He scared himself. A woman stumbles across him, and she gets frightened, so he tries to calm her, which only frightens her more. Two men appear to come and aid the woman, then one of them shoots the creature. He runs away from the men but knows they are going to tell everyone that he is still alive.
When the mob catches up to him, they bound him, hold the wounded creature in chains, and take him back to the town jail. No, those chains were not strong enough to hold him; he escaped, yet again.
On this trip around the outskirts of town, the creature is drawn to a hut by the beautiful strings of a violin being played exquisitely. We find out that the person who is playing the violin is an old, blind man. He happily welcomes the creature into his home and notices that he is distressed. The old man attends to his gunshot wound and lets the creature lie down to rest.
During this whole encounter, the old man realizes that the creature doesn’t know how to speak. However, he figures out that the creature can understand English. He feeds the creature and tells him they should become friends. There, he breaks down, saying he has prayed for so long to be sent a friend. The old man tells him that he will take care of him, and in return, he hopes the creature will comfort him. He lays him to sleep, grabs his hand, and thanks god for bringing two lonely children of his together. The blind man begins to happily cry, and the creature starts to cry as well.
On the following day, the two quickly became acquainted with one another. The man begins to teach the creature how to talk, starting with words like: friends, good, wine, smoke, and the word bad. His first sentence, he was able to form “Alone bad, friend good.” The two men who shot the creature showed up randomly at the hut in search of directions when they ended up spotting the creature. They begin to attack him, and the old man tries to defend the creature, saying he is his friend. A fire breaks loose and starts burning out of control, burning the whole hut up. The creature escapes one way because of the fire while the two men get the old man to safety a different way.
The creature stumbles across Dr. Pretorius in his travels. The doctor remains extremely nonchalant about coming in contact with the creature. The doctor has a plan to use him to coerce Henry into helping him create a female version of the creature. During a shared smoke, the creature agrees to help the doctor receive Henry Frankenstein’s partnership.
Henry Frankenstein is forced to help the doctor because the creature kidnapped Elizabeth as collateral. During the first attempt at the experiment, Henry realizes the heart they are using isn’t any good. They offered the doctor's assistant one thousand crowns as payment if he were to go to a morgue to get a fresh one. The assistant, of course, just goes and kills a young girl. Now, the creature is becoming antsy, and the doctor gives him a shot of liquor mixed with, what I assume is, a sedative because it knocked him out.
Now that the new heart has been beating out of a body for 9 hours, it is ready, along with the artificially constructed brain made at the hands of Dr. Pretorius. The perfect storm approaches quickly, and they draw out the kites to conduct enough electricity to pull this experiment off a second time. She’s alive, ALIVE! “The Bride of Frankenstein.”
Frankenstein's monster tries to warm up to the new monstress, but she too can’t help but be terrified of him. Elizabeth was able to escape her bounds and find herself outside the door of the doctor's laboratory, pleading for Henry to leave. The creature realizes that he shouldn’t be alive, the monstress shouldn’t be alive, and people who want to play God himself shouldn’t be alive. He yells for Henry to get out there, and the creature flips a lever that blows up not only the laboratory but the whole castle, aiding them three to their deaths.
The creature is rightfully pissed off in this first scene, in my opinion. The whole town helped each other to burn and bury him alive in the windmill, but mournfully carried Henry’s body back to his house. I think there still could have been a redemption in the creature before they tried to collectively murder him. What went down at the windmill that night was most assuredly the creature's villain origin story.
When Henry regains consciousness, instead of feeling pity about the lives that were lost at the hands of his creation, he entertains his desire to attempt the experiment again. Dr. Pretorius adds fuel to his burning flame, that is, Henry’s ambition to know the secret of eternal life. It feels like Henry can see how insane he looks by comparing himself to the doctor, and how similar they are becoming. When the doctor showed the miniature specimens he created, Henry was sure it wasn't science that created them but a form of black magic, yet there was still a part of him that wanted to know more.
As the creature catches his reflection in the waters, he gets frightened of himself, too. One could argue that the reflection shows him how much of a monster he became on the inside, which was why he got scared of himself. Or one could say that his physical appearance was also off-putting even to even himself. If we go with the first argument, then it could make the interaction with the old blind man different. He realized he didn’t want to be portrayed as a monster but as something good.
I don’t know what it is about a true friendship that just makes me emotional. When the blind man accepts the creature for his flaws and the creature does the same in return, it was such a beautiful moment in the movie. This whole interaction with the old blind man was specifically put there to show that the creature can feel empathy, remorse, sorrow, and love. His first sentence that he spoke clearly was “Alone bad, friend good.” This is someone that every single person wants dead because they think he is some evil monster. However, they wouldn’t feel that way if they met the creature that shared a tear with his new friend. Even when the hut got burned down by those two trigger-happy dudes, his first instinct was to run outside to try and aid his sightless friend, but he was nowhere to be found, and scared of being caught again, the creature ran away.
Dr. Pretorius was the next individual that the creature had a solo encounter with. The doctor’s nonchalant demeanor aided in keeping the creature in a relaxed state. He gestured politely to the doctor's cigar and said, “Smoke, friend.” The doctor offers him a cigar and talks to him like a normal person, I would even dare to say respectfully. In which respect can take someone a very long way. They were able to come up with a plan to get Henry to build a woman version of the creature for his companionship.
We can see that when the creature is face-to-face with Henry again, he has absolutely no respect for him. The creature speaks to Frankenstein and tells him that he must create another creature. To keep Elizabeth safe, Henry builds a woman in his image. I just have to say the monstresses body is absolutely tea when she is wrapped in gauze before her big reveal. With that being said, the creature is still aware enough to keep his emotions in control so that he can get himself a friend built by Henry.
Every time the creature was being engaged by hostility, even if it was based on fear of his appearance, this was when he acted his worst. Every time the creature was met with patience and understanding, he acted accordingly, except for Maria. If there was an adult there who wasn’t terrified of how the creature appeared, then they could have been like, “Creature, we don’t pick up our friends, put her down.” Henry Frankenstein was the real monster in the first movie. Whereas Dr. Dingus and his assistant are the real monsters in this sequel to this film.
Do you think the creature could have been taught to be good?
Anyone can be taught to be good
He was already good
His brain was already evil
You are the effects of your surroundings
Loved the read! Like watching the movies all over again :) Can’t wait for the next blog!!