Next year, Tom Cruise’s The Mummy will kick off Universal’s grand plan for a multiverse that connects its classic monsters. And besides the inevitable upgrade to modern, lavish special effects, Bride of Frankenstein will also be getting anther sort of update.
According to screenwriter David Koepp (whose prolific resume includes Jurassic Park, Mission: Impossible, Spider-Man, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and Inferno), Bride of Frankenstein will be a tale of “liberation”. He tells Collider:
It’s one of my favourite scripts I’ve written in years because if you reimagine the Frankenstein story, it gets into so many issues of men trying to feel dominant over women. To create someone who then says, “You don’t own me,” it becomes a tale of liberation.
He describes the character as “super-intelligent” (despite being dead, she’s “not a zombie”, an important distinction), and notes that the emphasis on character is in keeping with what Universal is planning for its other monster reboots:
Each one is characterised by the personality of its creature. So the stories are dictated by the creature. In ours, the Bride is essentially a sympathetic figure. This tragic, hunted figure.
Interestingly, Koepp also mentions (twice) how “fun” the movie is, too. So it sounds like the Bride doesn’t spend too much time cowering in the corner.
The scariest and saddest scene in 1935’s Bride of Frankenstein comes at the very end of the movie, when the monster meets his “mate” for the first time. She screams in terror, partly at the sight of him, but also because she’s not supposed to be aliiiiive… and after a brief melee, he agrees “We belong dead,” and they both perish. It will be interesting to see how the new version shifts the story to focus more on this iconic character who, truth be told, is barely in the movie that’s named after her.