“It’s a perfect night for mystery and horror. The air itself is filled with monsters,” Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (Elsa Lancaster) utters in the opening scene of James Whale’s 1935 film, “The Bride of Frankenstein.” As Halloween approaches this weekend, the Driftwood Players take Shelley up on her offer of a good horror story as they screen one of Hollywood’s most classic takes on the Frankenstein story.
The sequel to 1931’s “Frankenstein,” to this day “The Bride” is widely regarded as one of the few sequels to surpass its predecessor. A liberal continuation of the story inspired by Shelley’s 1818 gothic horror novel, Whale infused “The Bride” with a subversive humor and social satire that managed to pass muster with the rigid decency standards imposed by the Hays Office beginning in 1934.
Heavily influenced by German Expressionist filmmaking, Whale paints a landscape that is darkly foreboding and blindingly radiant, ominous and comical at the same time. There is more depth to the Monster this time around, now bestowed with a voice to articulate his loneliness and his resentment toward his creator who “made me from dead. I love dead. Hate living.”
The spirit of “The Bride” thrives in a film that came 40 years later, Mel Brooks’ “Young Frankenstein,” which is screening as part of Hotwire Coffeehouse’s Halloween Film Fest Oct. 30. Brooks’ 1974 movie is part parody, part reverential imitation of Whale’s Frankenstein films — the sets themselves were resurrected from the original “Frankenstein” production. Some of the best comedy lines in filmdom are delivered in this variation, as when in the presence of his assistant, Inga (Teri Garr) and his just arrived fiance Elizabeth (Madeline Kahn), Dr. Frederick Frankenstein (Gene Wilder) asks Igor (Marty Feldman) “would you give me a hand with the bags?” — to which Igor replies, in pitch-perfect Groucho Marx inflection, “Certainly, you take the blonde and I’ll take the one in the turban.”
For those souls seeking pre-Halloween entertainment, by all means seek out one of these classic films — or both, preferably, and take a bit of Lord Byron with you when you go. As he says to Mary Shelley as she unveils her tale or terror in “The Bride’s” prologue: “I’m all ears. While heaven blasts the night without, open up your pits of hell.”
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