Maggie Gyllenhaal’s ‘The Bride!’ and ‘Frankenstein’ History Explained

She’s alive! Finally.

When Maggie Gyllenhaal sat down to rewatch “The Bride of Frankenstein,” the 1935 James Whale classic, she wasn’t prepared for what she didn’t see. The Bride appears for only two minutes. She says nothing. She looks at the creature she was built to love, screams once and is blown up. She was made for a man who disgusted her, in a world that gave her no say in the matter. And then she was gone.

That, more or less, is how the story has always ended.

“She finds herself in such an insane situation,” Gyllenhaal said in a press conference promoting the film. “Having been brought back from the dead without her consent to be the wife of someone that she’s never met.” That absence — a character conjured into existence, denied everything and eliminated — fueled “The Bride!,” her new film starring Jessie Buckley and Christian Bale. The film’s ambition, in Gyllenhaal’s words, is sweeping: “a celebration of all of the parts of all of us that will not fit into the box that we’ve been told we need to fit into.”

“The Bride!” arrives amid a specific cultural appetite for stories like this, and not by coincidence. Guillermo del Toro’s recent “Frankenstein” reset the moral terms of the myth by building a film in which the creature never harms anyone who hasn’t first tried to harm him — every horror traced back to Victor’s choices, not his creation’s existence. Relatedly, “Poor Things” pushed Bella Baxter’s autonomy to its comic extreme. “The Substance” turned female rage into a grotesque spectacle and called it empowerment. Together, these films are doing something the Frankenstein myth has rarely allowed: placing the created woman’s interiority at the center, and asking what she actually wants. 

Scholars who’ve made careers of studying horror, feminist theory and the history of artificial women say the impulse goes far deeper than a single cultural moment — and far older than Hollywood.

Elsa Lanchester’s portrayal in Whale’s film remains one of cinema’s most arresting images: bolt-upright hair, a bandaged white gown and a piercing hiss directed at the creature she was built to love. Not a single word spoken. Barbara Creed, professor emerita at the University of Melbourne and author of “The Monstrous Feminine,” sees that silence as the whole point. Female monstrosity on screen is not simply a female version of the male monster — it is something more specific, rooted in the female body itself, in reproduction, sexuality, generative power. The horror the Bride provokes is not what she might do. It is what she is.

“She rejects all possibility of continuing the dominant social order,” Creed says. “She doesn’t want to be part of a continuation of the order dominated by male power and science.” The scream, the hiss, the explosion — not a monster’s rampage. A woman refusing the only role she was ever offered. And for refusing it, she is destroyed.

Her destruction is not a dramatic accident. It is, scholars say, the logical endpoint of how constructed women have always been imagined. Despina Kakoudaki, author of “Anatomy of a Robot” and professor at American University, notes that it’s a pattern predating “Frankenstein” by centuries. Artificial women, in the cultural imagination, are always created as adults and immediately assigned a purpose, which is always defined by someone else’s desire. Artificial men become soldiers and servants (a dead detective rebuilt as RoboCop; Bucky Barnes brainwashed to become the Winter Soldier; Anakin Skywalker resurrected as Darth Vader). Artificial women become wives and objects. Their sexualization is not incidental to the fantasy. It is the fantasy. 

Julie Wosk, author of “My Fair Ladies: Female Robots, Androids, and Other Artificial Eves,” traces the same architecture from “Pygmalion” forward: “Most of them are initially created to be perfect women, compliant and obedient. Men’s fantasies about a woman who didn’t have any ideas of her own.” The moment she gets ideas — desires, refusals, a self — she becomes the thing the story needs to contain or destroy.

Which is precisely what Mary Shelley understood when she wrote the original novel in 1818; she was 18 years old, already a mother twice over, her first child dead at two weeks old. She conceived the novel during the summer of 1816, stranded in Geneva with Percy Shelley and Lord Byron reading ghost stories and daring each other to write their own. What she produced was not a ghost story. It was a novel about the terror of creation, written by a teenager who had already experienced the terror of giving life and losing it. 

Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft — the first major feminist theorist in the English language — had died giving birth to her, and in the years that followed, her legacy was publicly destroyed: dismissed as a radical and a whore. Shelley grew up knowing exactly what happened to women who refused their prescribed role, and hid her most subversive arguments inside a story that looked, on its surface, like a cautionary tale about science.

Anne K. Mellor, professor emerita at UCLA and author of “Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters,” reads the novel’s most radical gesture not as the creature’s creation but as Victor’s decision to destroy the female creature before she can live. He tears her apart before she draws a breath, on the grounds that a woman with agency is a threat to civilization. Victor doesn’t just fear the creature’s mate. He fears what she represents: a woman who was never asked, never consulted and might have something to say about it. It is the novel’s most precise act of feminist encoding, and it is the scene that “The Bride!” is, in some sense, the answer to.

Gyllenhaal suspects Shelley wasn’t finished. “I wonder if Mary Shelley had a bit more she wanted to say,” she told journalists, “that was not only unpublishable in 1820, but unthinkable.” The black marks across Buckley’s face in the film are, in the production’s visual conception, the ink of Shelley’s own manuscript bleeding out — a woman underground for two centuries, unable to finish the thought. The Bride is not just a monster story; she is Shelley’s most suppressed idea, finally given room to breathe. Where every prior adaptation has treated her as a plot function — made, refused, destroyed — “The Bride!” insists she is the subject.

Creed sees the current wave of feminist horror as the tradition finally catching up to that idea. In classic horror, the female monster was a cautionary figure — terrifying precisely because she exceeded her assigned role, and was punished accordingly. What she observes now is different: heroines who undertake what she calls a katabasis, the ancient Greek journey into darkness, and emerge transformed rather than destroyed, having claimed rather than fled their own monstrousness. “Instead of becoming an abject thing, the heroine owns it,” Creed says. “She becomes partly abject herself, but she embraces her monstrosity.” 

Catherine Spooner, a professor of Gothic culture at Lancaster University, sees the same energy in the Gothic tradition’s long history of giving women room to express what polite discourse refuses. “It can be angry, it can be ragged,” she says. “And I think that really speaks to young women at this particular moment.”

The fantasy of perfect female compliance has not disappeared. It has staged a return, visible in tradwife aesthetics and nostalgia for female submission, and the reborn woman is in part a direct cultural response to it. The two phenomena feed each other in real time.

Mellor argues the myth extends into the most urgent anxieties of the present. “Frankenstein is the archetypal myth of people who seek knowledge without paying attention to its consequences,” she says. “This is all going on around A.I. now. The latest Frankensteinian invention that might create superhuman possibilities for mankind, or might destroy it.” Two centuries on, Shelley’s warnings remain the most precise available language for what it means to build something and refuse to be responsible for it.

The deeper question — and the one scholars keep returning to — is whether the women at the center of these stories are truly masters of their own fate, or whether even their rebellion is still being scripted by someone else. When “Poor Things’” Bella Baxter walks into the world on her own terms, is that liberation, or a new fantasy about what liberated women look like? As Wosk puts it, “Are we reliving that old conception of the freakish, pitied creature?” she asks, “Or is there something so poignant and alive about it that it’s something entirely new? That’s what I’m really curious about.”

It is a question that “The Bride!” seems built to sit inside rather than resolve. When Gyllenhaal was asked directly who the monster is in her film, she resisted the premise entirely. In her telling, the monstrous lives in all of us; the parts we’re told to suppress, the rage and strangeness that won’t fit the approved version of a person. “I dare you to turn around and shake hands with your monster,” she says. Not to defeat it. To claim it.

Buckley, who was also on the panel, said the Bride’s reanimation isn’t frightening so much as electrifying. “She’s got a mind and body that is reinvigorated in a way that she doesn’t even expect herself. It’s so alive, it’s so monstrous in the most kind of wild, brilliant way.”

For a centuries-old story, it has aged remarkably well — because, of course, it has barely aged at all.

“The idea of a male scientist trying to make an ideal woman, and that woman refusing to be governed by him,” Spooner says. “You can see immediately why it keeps being returned to.”

Whether “The Bride!” answers the deeper question — whether its title character is truly a master of her own fate, or whether she is still, in some way, being made — is something only the film can settle. But the fact that the question is finally being asked at feature length, with Frankenstein’s Bride at the center of her own story, is itself a kind of answer.

For 200 years, nobody thought to ask her. That, at least, has changed.

Jazz Tangcay contributed to this report.