Whale has long been valued by admirers of 1930s horror films, but in 1998, with the release of the biopic "Gods and Monsters," based on the novel Father of Frankenstein by Christopher Bram, his life was credited with a new significance. In an era when Hollywood was filled with homosexuals who stayed adamantly in the closet, he was portrayed as openly gay--not only in his life, but in his work. This view may have involved wishful thinking; biographers such as Anthony Slide say Whale was "a very private man who kept his personal life to himself," but that doesn't fit the thesis of critics such as Gary Morris, who interpret "Bride" as a bold gay parable. Morris' reading is sometimes torturous (are the Monster and the blind hermit a model for a "blissful married couple"?), but he may be right to see Praetorious and Frankenstein as the Monster's same-sex parents ("Henry the father in giving it life, Praetorious a mother-figure who nurtures it"). Praetorious (played by Ernest Thesiger in high camp overdrive) indeed sometimes seems to relate to the Monster as rough trade. Parable or not, the movie is more fun when its insinuations are allowed to glide beneath the surface as an unspoken subtext.

The film works perfectly well on its own terms, as a sequel to Whale's "Frankenstein" (1931), recasting the Monster as an outcast yearning for friendship. The credits for "Frankenstein" said it was inspired by a novel by "Mrs. Percy B. Shelley." "Bride" improves the billing of the feminist heroine, calling her "Mary Wolstonecraft Shelley" and adding a prologue in which Mary; her husband, Percy, and their friend Lord Byron imagine a sequel to the first story: The Monster survives being burned in a mill and staggers forth, alive and misunderstood.

Elsa Lanchester plays Mary Shelley and also has the unbilled role of the Bride--where she provides one of the immortal images of the cinema with lightning-like streaks of silver in her weirdly towering hair. Whale based the film's look on the stark shadows and jagged tilt shots of German Expressionism (from such horror films came the look of film noir in the 1940s). His inspiration for the Bride was Maria, the artificial woman from Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" (1927)--where he also borrowed ideas for Praetorious' laboratory, with its platform that lifts the Bride up to the heavens to be penetrated by lightning bolts. (Mel Brooks' laboratory for Praetorious in the 1975 "Young Frankenstein" is not merely similar--it uses the same props, which he discovered in storage.)