James Whale directed Frankenstein, The Old Dark House, The Invisible Man and Bride of Frankenstein in four years, which is the core of the Universal horror cycle and the most stylistically adventurous stretch in it.
Bride of Frankenstein is the strange one, openly funny, camp in places, and unmistakably on the monster’s side. The blind hermit sequence plays the creature’s only moment of kindness completely straight and it lands harder than any of the horror.
He was openly gay in 1930s Hollywood at considerable professional cost, and readings of the films through that have become standard. Gods and Monsters dramatises his last years.
