See the introduction and full slate here.
This week, a claustrophobic, homoerotic male sexuality faces off against a hungry, uncontrollable female sexuality, as James Whale’s classic horror sequel Bride of Frankenstein
Battles against David Cronenberg’s early masterpiece Rabid
Sex is a frightening thing. When I began this project, more time ago than I like thinking about, I did consider a “weird sex” category, but quickly realized that this category could reasonably include most of the horror films ever made. I suppose the very healthiest of us, the happiest and most well-adjusted, can claim that nothing to do with sex and the way human bodies have it is ever scary or disturbing. In general I hold such people in suspicion; no one can turn off every cultural influence.
There’s terror in the mechanics, apart from everything else - only a few other bodily functions remind us how earthly, how animal we are despite our pretentions. And there are the other aspects, known probably to all of us but felt most viscerally only by some. Sex, sometimes, has consequences in the form of a baby. Sometimes that can be avoided, sometimes not: much depends on time and place and the feelings of people in black robes and white lab coats. This is the fear that animates these two films: not of sex itself, but of everything that might follow from it. Both offer experiments in imagining sex and reproduction outside of the traditional nuclear family. Both experiments fail, leaving the audience with ambivalence about both sex and reproduction.
Bride of Frankenstein is a film about men who want to fully control the results of sex by taking over and replacing the process. Frankenstein and Pretorius want to create life, but in the sterile, clean environment of a lab - away from unpredictable bodies and the messy business of childbirth. Theirs is a creative process that removes women from the act of creation. Only men, in this story, can create life, and only men can offer each other true friendship.
When Pretorius and Frankenstein succeed in making a female monster - implying a union and children between the monsters - their constructed heterosexuality fails. The monster himself - lonely and eager for companionship, not procreation - is only able to forge a connection with a blind and pointedly male hermit, and he kills his bride at their first meeting. The experiment in sex-free and entirely male reproduction is a disaster.
Rabid is, conversely, a story of female sexuality that is both voraciously destructive and generative at once. Rose’s attacks on her (mostly) male victims are clearly presented as metaphorical rapes, that follow from either real seductions or from attempted assaults by the victims on Rose herself. In 1977, the year Rabid was released, a thoughtful viewer would have to consider the film in the context of not just the recent sexual revolution but feminism.
Rose’s appetite for victims does not seem mindless, but focused: she appears to punish men for their violent desire for her. Her attacks turn the tables on men who saw her as easy prey. When she does attack a woman, the scene begins as a kind of soft-core, gauzy girl-girl scene in a pool before descending into violence. Here, Rose seems to be punishing the male gaze of the camera, or even the viewer, for their objectification of her and of other women. Rose does this all unconsciously, but that feeds the idea that she is reflective of a feminine power that has loosed its bonds. She might do anything, consume or destroy anything.
Both experiments fail. The one in Bride of Frankenstein fails by not being radical enough - instead of pursuing earlier efforts at creating life without heterosexuality, the scientists decide to create a constructed proxy version of heterosexuality, one that is devoid of real feeling or affinity. The experiment in Rabid fails in a way that is murkier. Rose creates life by destroying it - she turns her victims into ravenous beings like herself, but she can’t control them, and one of them kills her. A film about the fear of unleashed female power ends with putting that female power back in its place: Rose is, in the end, just a body, killed by a man.
I don’t know which of these films should win; it feels like more of a coin flip than any of the other matchups so far. They are both beautiful, in different ways - though the expressionist influenced, stylized aesthetic of Bride of Frankenstein has a more obvious beauty than the grungy, exploitation affect of Rabid. Rabid is bizarrely beautiful, its images unexpected and shocking. It isn’t quite like a documentary, but it does have the visceral, immediate feeling of one, combined with that of a low-budget porn film.
Boris Karloff’s performance isn’t quite as arresting and magnetic as his performance in the original Frankenstein. I understand why they adjusted the makeup to allow for dialogue, but I think it was a mistake - the face being more mobile means sacrificing a measure of pathos, and Whale should have trusted himself and Karloff enough to know they could convey everything silently, as they had before. But he’s still Karloff, and he still finds all of the humor and human suffering in the monster, enough to carry the film. Marilyn Chambers is riveting in Rabid, and her well-known career as a porn actress adds a certain grim layer of catharsis to scenes where she seduces and slaughters predatory men.
What finally cements it for me, though, is Ernest Thesiger as Pretorious - Rabid simply doesn’t have anything this good. Thesiger is menacing, queer, clever, hilarious - he’s a delight. Pretorious is what makes Bride of Frankenstein a classic that can compete with its predecessor - a character as instantly iconic as the monster, but in a completely different way. Later Universal horror films would try to up the ante by pitting their classic horror monsters against each other, and the returns kept diminishing each time. Whale and his screenwriter William Hurlbut knew what the story needed, which was an even madder scientist. The actual Bride is a comparatively minor figure, but Elsa Lanchester with her wide eyes and wild hair is perfect, beautiful and deranged.
The oldie wins again - it has to be Bride of Frankenstein, one of the queerest film I think I’ve ever seen.