Nearly a century after many of them graced the big screen for the first time, many of the Universal Monsters endure as cinema icons. Including the Bride Of Frankenstein, despite only having mere minutes of screentime in the film named after her. And while those creatures always had something sympathetic about them – particularly Frankenstein, and his Bride – there’s plenty more of the good and the bad to explore nearly 100 years on.
Enter The Bride!, the latest film from Maggie Gyllenhaal as writer-director, turning the notion of the Bride Of Frankenstein into a film focused around the Bride herself, transplanted into ‘30s Chicago mobster territory. It’s all about getting into the monster lurking in us all. “I believe that every single one of us has a monstrous vein inside us. And by monstrous, I mean really monstrous. I mean terrifying to look at. You keep it hidden,” Gyllenhall tells Empire. “And so in my story, the monsters are monstrous. Even in the trailer, they do really awful things, and that’s just the beginning of it, honestly. And at the same time, they are heroes. And I hope that they’re relatable, even if they’ve been brought back from the dead. They’re in a lot of pain, like all of us are.”
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It should spark fresh life in reinventing one of the all-time-great movie monsters – getting down to the troubling notion of the Bride even being created (here, Jessie Buckley), at the request of her undead husband-to-be. The Bride! explores “what happens when you bring someone back to life, and they have their own needs, desires, and their own heat that is beyond anything you could have possibly imagined… then what happens?” The answers should be electric.