Maggie Gyllenhaal and Jessie Buckley reimagine Frankenstein’s bride

By Leah Dolan, CNN

(CNN) — Since the invention of moving pictures, directors have been drawn to Mary Shelley’s 19th century gothic classic, “Frankenstein.” In 1931 James Whale offered his definitive take on the story with actor Boris Karloff’s flat-topped skull and grunting speech. The film was a commercial hit and solidified Universal Pictures’ reputation as the home of horror. The creature was then dug up and reanimated through the eyes of Terence Fisher in 1957, Mel Brooks in 1974 and Kenneth Branagh in 1994, to name a few. The last reboot — an emotionally sympathetic, albeit Disney-fied rendition in which Jacob Elordi’s long dark lashes take center stage — came from Mexican director Guillermo del Toro just a few months ago. But while the mood, genre and artistic direction of these adaptations may have shifted over the last century, one element has remained fairly consistent: almost all have been directed by men.

Now a rare female voice enters the “Frankenstein” canon as Maggie Gyllenhaal’s “The Bride!”, starring Jessie Buckley, opens in theaters across the US and UK this week. The actor-turned-director takes inspiration from Whale’s spin-off sequel from 1935, “The Bride of Frankenstein,” starring Elsa Lanchester in a streaked electrified bouffant and arrow-like brows. In Shelley’s novel, the lonely creature demands a romantic companion after he is rejected by humanity. His scientist creator, Victor Frankenstein, reluctantly agrees, but at the last moment tears the unfinished mate limb from limb as the creature watches on in horror. Whale, and later fellow directors Franc Rodman, Branagh and now Gyllenhaal, imagined what might have happened if Frankenstein had completed the female monster.

But the release of “The Bride!” stirs up some larger questions about how few women have adapted this story, despite the fact it was originally written by one. We asked scholars, film curators and experts in Shelley’s work why that might be — and the impact it has on how we make sense of the 200-year-old tale.

Why have so many male directors remade ‘Frankenstein’?

The answer may be as simple as gender inequality. Throughout the early 20th century female film directors were few and far between, and could often be counted on one hand — from Alice Guy-Blanché and Lois Weber to Dorothy Arzner. “In film, there are far more male directors,” said Dr. Jo Botting, fiction curator at the BFI National Archive in London, matter-of-factly. “And I think horror is a genre that appeals possibly to more men.”

Still, some scholars think there is more to say about what draws the male directorial psyche to Shelley’s novel. “One cynical view might be that they identify with the God Complex,” said Daniel Cook, a professor at Dundee University in Scotland and expert in 18th and 19th century literature. “In many ways ‘Frankenstein’ the novel can function as a kind of metaphor for the creative process itself and its challenges, but also the rewards that come with that.” Just as Victor Frankenstein creates life, so do directors create an image of life on screen. “I think filmmakers perhaps feel a strange affinity with that,” Cook said.

Eleanor B. Johnson, an English professor at Columbia University and author of “Scream with Me: Horror Films and the Rise of American Feminism,” believes previous male directors have tended to focus exclusively on the novel’s themes of ambition and arrogance. “Filmmakers really like a narrative about hubris,” she said. “Victor Frankenstein’s core problem is he overestimates his own power. It’s the idea of a man who has hubris and then fails. That’s epic. That’s like our oldest story paradigm in the Western canon.”

“It’s a very director-sexy topic,” she continued.

Have we gotten ‘Frankenstein’ all wrong?

It’s perhaps easy to forget with a story as enduring as “Frankenstein,” whose male characters have reached such mythic status, that the tale was originally written by a teenage girl. In fact, Shelley’s novel was so inventive in its horrendousness that many of her contemporaries simply did not believe she could have written it. In the 1831 introduction to the book, Shelley wrote of the regular questioning she faced about how she, “a young girl, came to think of, and to dilate upon, so very hideous an idea?”

But for Johnson, it’s exactly this context we’ve been missing when interpreting — and adapting — the book. “There’s a feminist temptation to resist the impulse to read Mary Shelley’s novel as a novel written by a woman,” she said. “But the fact is that she was a woman, and she wrote the novel in the throes of repeated reproductive loss and injury,” Johnson added. “And not paying attention to that really blunts what the novel is doing.”

Johnson’s upcoming book, “Mother of Frankenstein: Mary Shelley’s Creature in the 21st Century,” re-reads the story through the lens of the author’s own tragic experience of motherhood. By the time she began writing the novel, Shelley had already lost her first child, Clara — and had even dreamed about bringing the baby back to life, according to diary entries. She went on to lose two more children in 1817 and 1819. Shelley re-used the name Clara for her second daughter, who died in infancy. “Which is not insignificant,” said Johnson. “She wanted to bring that baby back.” From this vantage point, the story can be understood as “a meditation on loss and vulnerability and grief,” said Johnson. “In particular, reproductive harm and reproductive loss.”

Even in the classroom, scholars are embarking on new readings of an old text. According to Cook, who teaches “Frankenstein” at university level, his students have recently become more interested in the novel’s gender dynamics. Particularly, the introduction to the bride before she’s torn to pieces and thrown into the sea. “They’re really struck by the violence that Victor imposes in that scene,” he said. “It’s just in the last two or three years, I think as discourse around gender based violence has really advanced, that they apply these ideas to a novel like ‘Frankenstein.’”

Does the gender of a director even matter?

Dr. Botting argues not. “Does every story have to have a new female perspective? I don’t know,” she said. “For me, the key to this story is that it’s about male hubris and a man playing God. I think there’s only so much tampering with the story in gender terms you can do.”

For Johnson, the answer is more complicated. The reading of “Frankenstein” as a tale of reproductive loss and maternal grief has been largely lost on-screen. “If you look at the major franchises in the 20th century,” she said, “all of them almost totally obliterate anything like a female perspective on the story.” She points out a number of female-centered “oblique adaptations” — movies that indirectly draw on themes in Shelley’s novel — such as the 2021 Cannes Palme d’Or winner “Titane” by Julia Ducournau, for example, or “Birth / Rebirth” (2023) by Laura Moss. But amongst the nearly 20 explicit “Frankenstein” remakes created between 1931 and 1977, she said, “all those films focus on men.”

The original 1935 film that inspired Gyllenhaal’s version also followed that vein. “I watched the movie and I was like, ‘Oh, the “Bride of Frankenstein” is a Frankenstein movie,” Gyllenhaal told the New York Times. In Whale’s picture, the bride doesn’t talk — only screams or hisses like an irritated cat — and is brought to life 5 minutes before the credits roll. It was this cinematic silencing that irked Gyllenhaal. “When I saw that movie, it made me think, ‘Wait,’” she said at her own film’s premiere in London. “I want to know what she has to say. I want to know how she’s thinking and feeling.”

However full the “Frankenstein” canon may feel, there’s room for at least one more.

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