Yours portly is kicking off the Halloween season a bit early this year—after all, it’s the first day of autumn!  I’m doing so with a classic Universal Pictures monster flick, 1935’s Bride of Frankenstein.

Prior to seeing the flick for the first time a year or two ago, I only really knew about the plot from Young Frankenstein (1974), which spoofs key scenes from Bride and Frankenstein (1931).  Shudder had Bride back on its service as of last week, so one night I watched it again, and really enjoyed it.

Bride of Frankenstein moves in a more comedic direction than its bachelor predecessor, with Frankenstein’s Monster smoking (and becoming addicted to) cigarettes and humorous homunculi—like an overly amorous king—offering up some laughs (and padding out the film’s refreshingly swift seventy-five-minute runtime).  But it still offers up some classic scares.

The film is depicted as a frame story, with Mary Shelley sharing the rest of her terrifying tale to Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron.  The story shifts to the ending of Frankenstein, with the peasants rejoicing over the Monster’s destruction in the burning windmill.  One peasant, however, has to see that the Monster is, indeed, destroyed, and soon meets a grizzly end at the hands of the—gasp!—the very same Monster.

Meanwhile, Dr. Henry Frankenstein, amid his recuperation from the events of Frankenstein, finds himself working with his former mentor, Dr. Septimus Pretorius, who has managed to create all manner of homunculi in little jars.  Pretorius wants to use Frankenstein’s method of reanimating dead bodies to create a mate for the Monster.  His belief is that the two can then create “life” together, making Frankenstein and Pretorius the creator “gods” of a new race of “life.”  Dr. Frankenstein is skeptical, but Pretorius holds his fiancée, Elizabeth, hostage, forcing Frankenstein to perform the grizzly work.

The titular Bride only shows up for a few minutes at the end of the film, just long enough to reject the Monster—who by this point can talk, smoke cigarettes, and understand friendship—sending him into a jaded rage.  The Monster releases the humans, proclaiming, “We belong dead,” and destroys the laboratory, presumably killing himself and the Bride.

That’s a very quick overview of the plot.  As for the film itself, it’s quite fun.  Yes, it’s a bit of a letdown to only get about three minutes of the Bride, but she looks awesome, complete with the wild bouffant and the shock of white down either side.  The Monster (once again portrayed by Boris Karloff) is impressive as always, and is the real star of what is ostensibly his “Bride’s” film.  He has a character arc, too, coming to first embrace his humanity, only to find he is still feared and rejected.  With the ultimate rejection from his would-be Bride, he comes to understand that his reanimated existence is a mistake, and makes the sacrifice that is necessary to end this monstrous toying with God’s Divine Order.

I am not sure when the first film sequel was made (and I don’t want to look it up right now), but I imagine Bride of Frankenstein is one of the earliest.  It’s a true sequel to Frankenstein, picking up directly at the end of the first film, and expanding upon the plot.  It’s almost like Universal Pictures set it up that way, although Wikipedia notes that “Universal considered making a sequel to Frankenstein as early as its 1931 preview screenings,” suggesting that the idea came early, but only after Frankenstein was in the can.  Regardless, it’s interesting to see such an early example of the sequel, which only really seemed to take off as a concept in popular film in the 1970s and 1980s.  Now everything is sequalized, serialized, rebooted, retconned, soft-rebooted, reimagined, etc., since Hollywood apparently doesn’t come up with any original ideas.

Well, Bride of Frankenstein might be a reboot, but it’s original in its own right.  Yes, it focuses mostly on the Monster from Frankenstein.  But it allows that monster to grow, and features some additional reflections on the folly of glorifying science and attempting to put ourselves in the place of God.