Bride of Frankenstein

The film begins where the first left off — then steps back. Mary Shelley herself appears, seated with Percy and Byron on a stormy night, to explain that the story the world knows is not the whole story. The windmill burned, yes. But both men survived it: Henry Frankenstein, broken and unconscious, carried home to Elizabeth; the monster, submerged and unseen, escaping through the flooded ruins below.

Henry recovers. He wants only to be done with all of it — to marry Elizabeth and let the experiments die with the windmill. Then Dr. Septimus Pretorius arrives. Pretorius was Henry's old mentor, dismissed from the university for reasons no one names aloud. He has been conducting his own experiments in private, and he brings the proof: glass jars containing tiny living humans, each one a different type — a king, a queen, a bishop, a devil, a mermaid, a ballerina — grown by him from scratch, not assembled from the dead. He finds them amusing. He wants to collaborate. His proposition: together, he and Henry will create a mate for the monster. Henry refuses.

The monster, meanwhile, wanders the countryside alone. He is driven from every place he enters. He falls into a pond. He is captured and chained in a village square like an animal. He escapes into the forest and stumbles onto the cottage of a blind hermit, who cannot see his face and does not flinch. The hermit feeds him, speaks to him gently, and teaches him words: bread, wine, good, friend. The monster weeps. It is the first time anyone has treated him as a being rather than a thing. The friendship lasts until two hunters find the cottage and destroy it. The monster flees again, carrying the only warmth he has ever known.

He finds Pretorius in a crypt, raiding graves by candlelight with the cheerful practicality of a man who long ago stopped being troubled by such things. Pretorius gives the monster wine, shows him the tiny people in their jars, and tells him about the mate — a companion, made for him. The monster listens. Pretorius has found his leverage. He uses the monster to abduct Elizabeth, holding her hostage until Henry agrees to continue the work. Henry agrees. He has no other choice.

They build her in the mountaintop laboratory during a tremendous storm — corpse by corpse, organ by organ, with all the electrical apparatus that defined the first creation amplified and refined. She is brought to life. She is tall, dark-eyed, her hair shot through with white streaks, her movements birdlike and strange. The monster is brought before her, trembling. He reaches toward her. She hisses — a sharp, reflexive, animal rejection — and turns away in revulsion. He tries again: "Friend?" She screams. Even the thing made to be his equal cannot bear to look at him.