Lucinda Breeding

The buzz among movie fans this week has been the pending remake of the 1935 monster movie Bride of Frankenstein. There’s no hard release date yet, but a 2011 release has been mentioned more than once, with Neil Burger (The Illusionist) writing and directing.

The 1935 classic was a sequel to the original Frankenstein, starring the inimitable Boris Karloff.

American cinema is awash in remakes: King Kong, Last House on the Left, Dracula and most recently Star Trek. We especially like to give old horror movies a makeover.

There’s not much information available about the remake just yet. Just one morsel of news has gotten bloggers and entertainment writers heating up their keyboards: The bride in this Frankenstein will be more like Scarlett Johansson or Anne Hathaway and less like Elsa Lanchester, who originated the big-haired character.

The word from the pre-production crew is that this bride will be “hot.” Or “hawt,” as bloggers put it.

Whichever actress is cast in the role, she’ll be younger and have more sex appeal than Lanchester.

Sex appeal? Really? Audiences are meant to disregard the inevitable rendering of Frankenstein as a grotesque monster, stitched and bolted together for function rather than for form, but the woman made to be his soul mate is to be presumably dewy, taut and blessed with shiny hair and teeth?

Or maybe that’s the point. Maybe ticketholders expect women in movies and mythic stories to be perfectly proportioned and put together for form and form alone. We are living in an era in which Los Angeles dictates cosmetic aesthetics for the rest of the world. Maybe it’s not such a stretch for a new bride of Frankenstein to be sculpted by the most gifted hands in the field of plastic surgery.

It’s widely accepted that every culture has its monsters, and that they usually stand in for our deepest fears.

What made Frankenstein’s monster, with his hulking frame and outstretched hands, so terrifying was his wanderlust and independent streak. That, mixed with his brute strength and dull moral senses, felt like a recipe for disaster. It also felt like a cautionary tale against fiddling around too much with the human animal. God is the great engineer, and mere mortals can’t outrun death with medicine. There should only be one creator per universe, and dying is part of the grand plan.

So where does the bride of Frankenstein come in? She was created for the same reasons that Eve was formed in Genesis — to soothe the loneliness of the freshly made monster. Loneliness begets vice, the suggestion goes. The monster rises from his slab with an innate craving for independence and to know the world, but he finds that life outside of his creator’s walls is hostile, violent and altogether uncertain. Chased back to Dr. Frankenstein’s castle, the monster needs a companion.

Frankenstein sets about curing the beast’s loneliness. He crafts a woman in much the same way he begat the monster. A companion will keep the monster happy and quiet, or so Frankenstein hopes. In the 1935 version, Lanchester affected a cold stare, memorable box-shaped hair and a stiff bearing. She didn’t radiate warmth, and in true horror film fashion, she raised goose bumps on the arms of 1930s audiences.

So let’s say Johansson or Hathaway plays the revamped wife of a shuffling monster. How will we be terrified or upset by a fresh, ripe woman built to be the mate of a manmade ogre?

Burger might be hinting at a more modern fear: the fear of being rejected by one of the Beautiful People.

That’s not the implication of the 1935 film, though. In the original Bride of Frankenstein, the woman made for the monster rejects him. It turns out that even though she was created for the sole purpose of being his companion, the bride had little use for her husband. She wanted independence just the same.

Which is probably what really made her a monster in the first place.

LUCINDA BREEDING can be reached at 940-566-6877. Her e-mail address is cbreeding@dentonrc.com.