The Best Movie Of Each Year From 1925-2025

91. 1935 - The Bride Of Frankenstein

Honourable Mentions: The Informer, Mutiny on the Bounty, The 39 Steps

James Whale was a genre pioneer for Gothic horror on the big screen. While the silent era had birthed its own gripping interpretations of the literary movement, particularly through the expressionist lens of West German cinema, Hollywood was now adding sound to the equation, beginning with Tod Browning's Bela Lugosi-starring Dracula in 1931. Whale was next with Frankenstein, which, just as Browning's film did for Bram Stoker's creation, defined Mary Shelley's monster in popular memory.

That first Frankenstein film conjured some incredible imagery, particularly in its iconic windmill sequence, but it was quaint in ways Browning's film wasn't thanks to some bizarre moments of levity. Whale would not repeat the same mistake for his sequel, The Bride of Frankenstein, which enmeshed itself more dutifully in Shelley's cautionary themes of creation and consciousness and built up from them in trailblazing ways. It's an altogether more confident picture, combining a mesmerising mix of visual effects work and epic set design to create a story that's bigger, but surprisingly more intimate.

Whale's film is one of love, rejection, and isolation, but strong as its thematic currents are, there's simply no overstating the pure visceral power of Elsa Lanchester's Bride. She is, ironically, a perfect creation, and probably the single-most defining image of that original era of Universal monsters.