By the time the sequel
came out, Boris Karloff was so famous he was billed above the
title as simply "Karloff," and Universal tried to drum up
interest by not revealing the name of the actress chosen to play
the bride (the credits say "The Bride . . . ????") and by
promoting the fact that this time the monster would speak! There
might be a little bit of a giveaway in the movie's prologue,
however, in which Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley tells the pansies
Byron and Shelley that "That wasn't the end at all" of her story.
Playing Mary Shelley is Elsa Lanchester, to be reincarnated at
the end of the movie as you-know-who. Gay director James Whale
camps it up, treating the monster as a Christ figure while
shooting the whole movie in a dank, dark castle where everyone
looks pasty and spectral due to the now cliched German
Expressionist style necessary for all horror films. Yet it's very
stilted and talky, as Colin Clive (as Dr. Frankenstein) and
Ernest Thesiger (as the bitchy, cadaverous Dr. Pretorius) have
endless debates about whether to re-enter the laboratory and
unleash "a new world of gods and monsters." ("Perhaps death is
sacred, and I've profaned it!") The ending is great, but it takes
a long time to get there. The music by Franz Waxman is the first
full orchestral score written for a horror film, and Waxman was
also the first to use the theremin, a contraption of Russian
invention which used oscillating radio waves to make the surreal
sound which would become a staple of horror films. Lanchester's
Nefertiti-style look is credited to the temperamental Jack
Pierce, who by now was Hollywood's king of special effects
makeup. Nine dead bodies. One drowning. Pit-flinging. Grave-
robbing. Tiny beings in jars. Angry villagers. Death plunge.
Torched cottage. Brain surgery. Heart surgery. Mutant-building.
Gratuitous gypsies. Dungeon Fu. Vigilante Fu. With Valerie Hobson
(later Mrs. John Profumo) as the whiny wife Elizabeth, O.P.
Heggie as the old blind hermit who shelters the monster, Una
O'Connor as Minnie, E.E. Clive as the burgomaster with the giant
fake mustache. And Karloff's first big speech? "Alone bad.
Friends good." Written by Broadway playwrights William Hurlbut
and John L. Balderston (who had written "Frankenstein" for the
stage). Banned in several countries. 
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