20 Brilliant Sci-Fi & Fantasy Films Where Actors Play Opposite Themselves

Frankenstein has been a staple of science fiction cinema since the 1930s, and while the century since has seen countless adaptations and re-imaginings of the Mary Shelley novel, the original spate of these monster movies is still held to be some of the best - films whose aesthetics permanently altered pop culture.

Bride of Frankenstein was the first sequel to Universal’s 1931 Frankenstein, and returned Boris Karloff to his iconic role as Frankenstein’s Monster. Picking up a subplot but ultimately moving away from the original book, James Whale’s sequel imagines a world in which Dr. Frankenstein (Colin Clive) is blackmailed by his old mentor Dr. Pretorius (Ernest Thesiger), and threatened by the Monster into constructing a monstrous bride, played by Elsa Lanchester.

But Lanchester also plays Shelley herself, as the film opens in the “real world” at Lord Byron’s residence, the Villa Diodati, where she has just finished telling the tale of Frankenstein and wants to continue spinning a yarn. It makes sense to cast Lanchester in both parts because it reinforces the frame narrative, that these terrifying and impossible characters are the work of a fiction currently being told by a teller whose own aspects seep into the story, in the same way the Simpsons family always shares a likeness with the fictional characters in the Treehouse of Horror episodes.