Products You May Like
Well. It finally happened. Someone looked at the Bride of Frankenstein, a character who had roughly four seconds of screen time in 1935, hissed at a guy, and immediately got blown up, and said, “What if she had things to say?” Revolutionary concept, apparently.
Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! hit theaters this past week, and the internet has been doing what the internet does best: having seventeen different opinions at once. Jessie Buckley is electric. Christian Bale is unrecognizable. The movie is a feminist masterpiece. The movie is a gorgeous mess. It made thirteen million dollars. It might lose ninety million. Pick a lane, people.
But regardless of where you land on the film itself, there is something genuinely fascinating about what The Bride! represents. Not just as a movie, but as the latest entry in a very long, very strange tradition of horror finally handing the mic to its female monsters and going, “OK. Your turn. Try not to kill everyone.” They always kill everyone. That is the point.
She Was Never Supposed to Talk
Let’s rewind. Way back. 1935. James Whale directs Bride of Frankenstein. Elsa Lanchester shows up in the final minutes of the film with that iconic lightning bolt hair, takes one look at the monster she was literally built for, screams, and then the whole castle explodes. That is her entire arc. Born, horrified, dead. A whole life cycle in under five minutes. Speedrun of existence.
And for decades, that was considered enough. The Bride was an image. A silhouette. A really cool Halloween costume. Nobody seemed particularly interested in what she might have been thinking during her extremely brief time alive. Which, honestly, tracks. Horror in the early twentieth century was not exactly lining up to ask women how they felt about things. Women in horror existed to scream, faint, get rescued, or die. Often all four, in that order.
But Mary Shelley, the woman who invented the whole franchise back in 1818 when she was barely twenty years old, might have had other ideas. In the original novel, Victor Frankenstein actually starts building a female creature and then tears her apart before she can take a single breath. His reasoning? She might have opinions, or refuse to cooperate. She might, horror of horrors, reproduce. So he destroys her. Problem solved. Nothing unsettling about that at all.
Gyllenhaal clearly read that passage and thought, “Yeah, no, we are fixing this.” The Bride! takes the destroyed woman and rebuilds her. Literally. Jessie Buckley plays a murdered woman reanimated in 1930s Chicago who wakes up with a head full of rage and a mouth that will not stop running. She was not asked to be here. She did not sign up for this. And she is absolutely not going to sit quietly next to some guy just because a scientist thought she should.
It is, in a way, the answer to a question Mary Shelley posed two hundred years ago and never got to finish asking.
The Monstrous Feminine, or: Why Horror Has Always Been Terrified of Women
Here is the thing about female monsters in horror. They have always existed. But for most of cinema history, the scary part was not what they did. It was what they were.
Barbara Creed wrote the book on this. Literally. The Monstrous-Feminine came out in 1993 and basically argued that female monsters on screen are not just scary women. They are manifestations of what society finds terrifying about femininity itself. Sexuality. Reproduction. Autonomy. The idea that a woman might look at the life she has been given and say, “No thanks, I am going to do something else.” That is the monster. Not the fangs. Not the claws. The refusal.
Think about it. Irena in Cat People back in 1942. A woman so afraid of her own desire that she literally transforms into a predator when she is aroused. The movie frames this as a curse. But the real horror is not that she becomes a panther. The real horror is that she wants things. Carrie White drenched in pig blood at prom, unleashing telekinetic fury on everyone who ever laughed at her. The monster is not the psychic powers. The monster is a teenage girl who finally snaps.
For decades, these characters existed as warnings. Do not want too much. Do not feel too deeply. Do not refuse what you have been given. And if you do, the movie will punish you for it.
The Glow Up
Something shifted around the turn of the century. Slowly, and then all at once.
Ginger Snaps showed up in 2000 and turned the werewolf movie into a puberty metaphor so blunt it was almost hilarious. A teenage girl gets bitten, starts transforming, and the entire film plays her lycanthropy as a parallel to the nightmare of growing up female. Growing hair in weird places, sudden violent urges, the overwhelming desire to eat boys. Relatable content for some. Terrifying content for others.
Then Jennifer’s Body happened in 2009. And yes, I know, I bring this movie up constantly, but it deserves it. Diablo Cody wrote a film about a teenage girl who gets sacrificed by an indie band, comes back as a man-eating demon, and starts picking off boys at her high school. The film bombed. Critics hated it. The marketing sold it as a Megan Fox vehicle for the male gaze and completely ignored the fact that it was a razor-sharp satire about female friendship, sexual violence, and the commodification of women’s bodies. It took nearly a decade for people to figure out what that movie was actually doing. Better late than never, I suppose.
From there, the floodgates opened. The Witch in 2015 ended with Thomasin choosing the devil over her own suffocating family. Raw in 2016 turned a coming-of-age story into a cannibal awakening. Midsommar in 2019 let a grieving woman burn her terrible boyfriend alive inside a bear carcass and framed it as catharsis. The Substance in 2024 turned Demi Moore into a body horror nightmare about the impossible standards placed on aging women. Each one took the “monstrous feminine” and flipped the script. The monster was no longer the problem. The monster was the solution.
So Where Does ‘The Bride!’ Fit?
Right in the middle of all of it, honestly. And that is both its strength and its struggle.
The Bride! is clearly aware of the tradition it is walking into. Gyllenhaal has talked about wanting to give the Bride a voice after watching Whale’s 1935 film and being disappointed that the character never speaks. The film frames itself as the story Mary Shelley always wanted to tell but could not, both because she died and because the world was not ready to hear it. The black marks on Buckley’s face are meant to represent the ink of Shelley’s manuscript bleeding through. It is a lot. It knows it is a lot.
The movie got compared to Joker: Folie à Deux almost immediately, which is honestly kind of brutal. Both films take iconic characters, hand them to ambitious directors with bold artistic visions, and let them swing for the fences in ways that divided audiences down the middle. The difference is that The Bride! seems to actually have something to say about the character it is reinventing. Whether it says it clearly enough is another conversation.
Buckley is getting near-universal praise. Multiple reviews describe her performance as “electrifying,” which feels almost too on the nose for a character who is literally brought to life with electricity. Bale disappears into the monster role the way Bale disappears into every role. Which, at this point, is less a compliment and more just a factual observation about how the man operates.
The film is visually gorgeous, tonally chaotic, and narratively overstuffed. It wants to be a feminist manifesto and a gangster movie and a love story and a gothic horror all at the same time. Sometimes it pulls it off. Sometimes it trips over its own ambition and faceplants into the nearest wall.
But here is the thing. Even a messy version of this story matters. Because for almost a century, the Bride of Frankenstein was a prop. A visual. A scream and an explosion. And now she is a character who gets to rage and love and destroy and choose. Even if the movie around her cannot quite keep up, the fact that she gets to exist as a full person instead of a five-minute footnote is significant.
The Monsters Are Talking Now
The trajectory is clear. From Elsa Lanchester’s wordless hiss to Jessie Buckley’s unhinged monologues. From Cat People’s terrified repression to Jennifer’s Body’s gleeful carnage. From the Bride being torn apart before she could breathe to the Bride tearing apart everyone who wronged her. The female monster in horror is no longer a cautionary tale. She is the protagonist.
And if we are being honest, she always should have been.
Horror has more female protagonists than almost any other genre. That has been true for a long time. But for most of that history, those women were survivors, not monsters. They were the final girls who made it out alive because they followed the rules. Did not drink. Did not have sex. Did not step out of line. The new wave of female horror does not care about those rules. The new wave wants the woman who breaks them all and then burns the rulebook for warmth.
Is The Bride! a perfect film? No. Is it going to make its money back? Almost certainly not. Is it part of a conversation that horror has been building toward for decades? Absolutely. And that conversation is not going anywhere.
The monsters are talking now. And they have a lot to say.
If the universe has a sick sense of humor, and it clearly does, we will probably get a Bride cinematic universe by 2028. At this rate, I would not even be mad about it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=videoseries