20 Horror Films Where Humans Are The Real Monsters

20. The Bride! (2026)

Director Maggie Gyllenhaal came out of left field this year with the second Frankenstein feature in so many months: The Bride!

Casting Jessie Buckley as the classic horror movie icon, the Bride of Frankenstein (technically the Bride of Frankenstein’s Monster, or, here, the Would-Be Bride of Frankenstein’s Monster), Gyllenhaal’s film finds itself in a post-prohibition, pre-war Chicago, where appetites run wild, and our protagonist is slain by mobsters and awakened from death by Christian Bale’s “Frank” in order to embark on a new kind of night life. The Bride struggles with her memory, identity, and place in the world, while being hunted by crime boss Lupino (Zlatko Buric) and falling for Frank against her better nature.

The film is a mess of stories, tones, characters, and concepts, but at its core is a fusion of two genres: a monster movie and a gangster movie. And it’s in the latter, not the former, where we find the film’s ugly side. Because, although The Bride! is literally led by two inhuman beings who have been cobbled together from parts and raised from the grave, Lupino is the true monster.

The mobster kills his own men on a whim, orders the execution of women, and is the embodiment of the city’s festering soul, keeping the streets and their people in a stranglehold. Not monstrous enough for you? Well, he also cuts out his victims’ tongues and keeps them in jars.