Bride of Frankenstein (James Whale, 1935)

One of the greatest sequels, horror films, Universal monster movies, and classic Hollywood films ever made, Bride of Frankenstein pulls off the almost impossible trick of amplifying the camp and comedy elements that were a small part of Frankenstein without diminishing the horror or sacrificing any of the emotion. And James Whale was one of the greatest visual stylists in the first century of film.

Whale was a gifted director in multiple genres, including musicals (the most famous being Show Boat), comedies, adventures, melodramas, thrillers, romances, and war movies, but his enduring reputation as one of the great classic Hollywood directors was primarily earned by the four horror movies he made for Universal (Frankenstein, The Old Dark House, The Invisible Man, and Bride of Frankenstein). Whale was also openly gay, which was a brave, unusual, and potentially career-damaging way of living in '30s and '40s Hollywood (or '30s and '40s anywhere), and it's not hard to see gay subtext (or just plain text) in his films, making him a pioneering figure in queer cinema. After a handful of box-office disappointments in the late '40s, Whale was unable to find employment in the film industry for the rest of his life. This seems like an extraordinarily harsh penalty for a man who made multiple enduring classics that were hits with both critics and audiences. It's not a stretch to suspect that the commercial flops were a convenient excuse for keeping an out gay man out of the business. I wish he'd continued to work independently, but that's a tough life, too.

Both Mary Shelley's novel and Whale's 1931 film adaptation end definitively and poetically, so the idea of a sequel seems like a misguided undertaking. Whale lets us know right off the bat that he's fully aware of that and that he's up to something tonally different with a campy, funny prologue (filmed with an elegant, gliding camera) involving Byron, Percy Shelley, and Mary Shelley, once again together on a dark and stormy night. Elsa Lanchester pulls double duty as Mary and Frankenstein's bride, and she steals the movie with her brief but memorable performances at each end of the film. A hilariously over-the-top Gavin Gordon as Lord Byron can't get over his disbelief that the gentle, afraid-of-storms Mary could write such a chilling tale as Frankenstein. Mary tells him there is even more to the story than the novel, and a rapt Byron and Percy take seats next to her as she unfolds the rest of the Frankenstein saga after a brief recap of the first film's highlights.

The action picks up immediately after the first film's ending, with most of the cast returning in the same roles. Dwight Frye is a notable exception. His character died in Frankenstein, so he's playing a different, though equally ill-fated, person in the sequel. Boris Karloff's monster and Colin Clive's Dr. Frankenstein also died in the first film. What the sequel proposes is that they did not. Both survive with minor injuries, and Frankie's monster goes on another village rampage, though he's only trying to find a place in the world where people will stop screaming at him and chasing him with burning torches. It's banal to say it out loud or on paper (though Whale does a beautiful job turning it into visual poetry), but man is the real monster in these movies.

Dr Frankie is semi-ready to move on from the playing God business, marry Elizabeth (Valerie Hobson), and concentrate on more ethical, run-of-the-mill science experiments, though recent monster-based events have made Elizabeth roughly 15% crazy. The future looks semi-bright with the occasional thunder shower until Dr. Pretorious (Ernest Thesiger) shows up. Pretorious makes other mad scientists look like mild-mannered accountants, but he's a crafty bastard. He has also created life, but the proportions are wrong. His people were grown in petri dishes "from seed" (eewwww), but they're only action-figure size.

Pretorious wants Frankenstein to join forces with him and create a woman. A full-sized woman! To quote They Might Be Giants, "she's actual size but she seems much bigger to me." You can tell Frankenstein wants to do it. The passion for creating life in the lab is still there, but his conscience stops him. Like I said mere words ago, Pretorious is a crafty bastard, so he has ways to get Frankenstein on board with 1935's hottest science collab. Eventually, Operation: Bride of Frankenstein is a go.

Meanwhile, Frankenstein's monster is on a dark night of the soul. He has several unpleasant run-ins with people before finding a friend in a lonely blind man (O.P. Heggie). He also discovers that he's a bit of a party monster. The old man introduces him to the joys of cigars, wine, and music, and he simply can't get enough. He also loves biting into a hunk of bread, but he still understandably hates fire. This monster is alright. I like the cut of his jib. Things go south when a couple of villagers show up and spoil everything for everybody. One of these villagers is played by a very young John Carradine. The monster, on the road again, eventually crosses paths with Pretorious, and things heat up, bride-wise, as most of our principal characters come together in a thrilling finale.

Elsa Lanchester's bride is only onscreen for a few minutes, but it's enough to create several of the most iconic images in film. She looks amazing with her B-52's beehive-on-an-incline electro-shocked hair with a gray corkscrew swirl, jawline stitches, and dark lipstick and eyebrows on her pale face, and her movements and facial expressions are mesmerizing. I love her performance and look so much. I was tempted to illustrate this post exclusively with stills of the bride, but I stopped myself at three images.

Everything works beautifully in this movie. It exceeds expectations and transcends sequel-itis. It has a real emotional core existing alongside the comedy and horror, and it turns loneliness, isolation, outsiderdom, alienation, and unrequited yearning into visual art. Whale's style is an eye-popping blend of previous decades' silent film imagery, the then-current innovations of contemporary Hollywood, and a way-ahead-of-its-time sensibility whose tendrils keep extending into modern culture. I've been watching a lot of Dragula lately, and this movie shares some DNA with the drag monsters appearing on the show. I love, love, love Bride of Frankenstein. My only question is, what eventually happens to Pretorious's tiny people, grown from "seed"?

Children of the Corn (Fritz Kiersch, 1984)

Unbelievably, I had never seen Children of the Corn until last night. I say unbelievably because I grew up a horror fanatic in small-town Nebraska, mere miles from the film's setting (though hundreds of miles from the actual filming locations), I'd read the Stephen King short story that provides the film's source material, and I had gazed upon the VHS cover hundreds of times while perusing the horror sections at both the local video store and the three convenience stores that also rented movies. (In the early days of the VHS craze, nearly half the businesses in my tiny hometown also rented movies, including a gas station, a pizza place, and, briefly, a hardware store, but only the video store and one convenience store kept renting by decade's end.)

This should have been a candidate for formative childhood movie, but I had my reasons for ignoring it. I figured I already knew what happened from the Stephen King story, and I was also a little puzzled about how they were going to stretch a whole movie out of it. I was excited when my home state popped up in the story (big Steve's writing about my home turf of western Nebraska! nobody does that!), but the idea of watching a Nebraska-set movie when I actually lived there and was bored by living there didn't really appeal. I also had a bias against horror movies about evil children. As an adult, I love creepy killer kids, but when I was a kid myself, I wasn't buying it. Kids were too easy to defeat, I remember thinking. Just smack a few of them around. They're tiny. (I didn't realize there were teens in the movie. Teens could be scary.) I felt this way about killer dolls, too, but I've since come around. When I popped into the video store to rent some horror, I was looking for Romero's zombies, Freddy, Jason, Leatherface, Michael Myers, serial killers, science experiments gone wrong, and fucked-up monsters. You could keep your pint-size antagonists. Finally, I knew there was a religious aspect to the movie. Again, as an adult, I think religious cults are a great subject for horror, but as a kid, my least favorite hour of the week was the hour spent in church, so I didn't want any God talk mixing with my entertainment (unless you were going to throw some demonic possession or scary devils into the mix). Sorry, Children of the Corn. You had too much stacked against you.

Roughly 67.8 Children of the Corn movies exist and NONE of them have been filmed in Nebraska. At least this first film and the remake were shot in neighboring Iowa, but production on some of the sequels, reboots, etc., has taken place in such non-Nebraska Nebraskas as California, North Carolina, Kentucky, Canada, Oklahoma, Australia, and my current city of Austin, Texas. Either Nebraska has lousy tax breaks or, much like the titular children of the titular corn, doesn't cotton to strangers. Or those elitist movie folk from the city have a condescending bias against my home state. Who should I be mad at here?

WARNING: Corn-based rant ahead. Skip ahead one paragraph if you aren't a current or former Nebraskan. Most of the movie takes place in the fictional town of Gatlin, "19 miles from Hemingford." Hemingford is real and roughly an hour's drive from my hometown. One look at this movie by a native of the area, and that native would know that something's not quite right. We're hundreds of miles east of Hemingford, my friends, not 19 miles. Yeah, most of Nebraska is pretty flat and has a lot of corn, like in this movie. And, yeah, there is still quite a bit of corn in my former neck of the woods. But the rows and rows of corn smack up against the highway are a familiar sight in eastern Nebraska and our neighbors to the east and south, Iowa and Kansas, and not a familiar sight 19 miles from Hemingford. Western Nebraska is not that flat, contrary to stereotypes, and is instead full of rolling hills, large rock formations, and even some man-made lakes. I didn't appreciate this when I was growing up, but it's a pretty part of the country (though sometimes a political nightmare).

WARNING: Car radio rant ahead. Skip to the next paragraph if you're ready for the rants to end. I also want to express irritation at the two scenes in which our adult outsiders, Burt and Vicky (Thirtysomething's Peter Horton and The Terminator's Linda Hamilton), are driving through Nebraska and turn on the car radio, only to be blasted with an evangelical fire and brimstone preacher. In both instances, they turn off the radio without even attempting to change the station and say condescending things about Nebraska. Is your radio stuck on one dial? Do you not know that there is more than one radio station per geographical area? What gives, Burt and Vicky? Nebraska is not a big fire and brimstone evangelical area, and there's not a lot of preaching going on there, radio-wise. (Though Rush Limbaugh's unfortunate popularity in the '90s opened the door to much more talk radio on the dial later; Limbaugh was also the gateway to half my family turning into brainwashed kooks. Fox News, 9/11, and Facebook delivered the death blows.) The Assembly of God and Jehovah's Witnesses churches have a presence in the area, but not on the radio, most of the population tends to be moderately Protestant or Catholic, and no one is too loud about it, at least in my years there. I heard a lot more preaching of the evangelical kind on my drives through Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee. Burt and Vicky should have turned the dial to 93.3 to get the classic rock and current pop hit stylings of Scottsbluff's KMOR (currently all classic rock; they dropped the pop after I moved and briefly experimented with a mainstream alternative rock format in the wake of Nirvana in the mid-'90s) or 102.3 KPNY out of Alliance (future home of Carhenge and the town that employed my dad) for more classic rock and pop (and hard rock in the evenings). Ironically, KPNY now has a Christian music format. Did Isaac get to them? Or was it Malachai's work?

Rants over. We're six paragraphs in. What did I actually think of the movie? It's OK. Not one of the all-timers, despite its 39.4 sequels, but a reasonably entertaining watch, in '80s New World Pictures comfort-food style. The opening thirty minutes are reasonably creepy and atmospheric, but the movie gets sillier as it progresses, though the corn children's artwork is sick as hell. In a way, Children of the Corn is a folk horror movie (one of my absolute favorite horror subgenres), just a crasser, more commercial version.

Most of you know the basic plot. Child preacher Isaac (Tammy and the T-Rex's John Franklin) has a weird sway over most of the children of Gatlin. He preaches to them in the cornfields, and one Sunday, he organizes a mass murder of every adult in the town. The kids have taken over, and once you turn 19, you're summoned to the corn and taken away by God, or Satan pretending to be God, or an Atari game brought to life, or just killed by creepy kids. We don't know yet. Either way, this cult doesn't seem destined for longevity. His right-hand man Malachai (The 'Burbs' Courtney Gains) is the creepiest and tallest of the kids, tweens, and teens, and he organizes most of the violence, though there is increasing tension between Malachai and Isaac. Brother and sister Job and Sarah don't buy into Isaac's cult nonsense or his strict rules (no games, no music, no TV, no fun, no hanging out in their old house), but Isaac allows them to bend a few of the rules and avoid a lot of the religious ceremony because Sarah has visions of the future, which she draws. You can't draw or make any art for fun in Gatlin, but you are allowed to draw visions of the future and make creepy corn-based religious art. The aforementioned Burt and Vicky are in the middle of a cross-country road trip to Burt's new job in Seattle and end up in the wrong place at the wrong time. Isaac calls them "outlanders" and instructs his flock to kidnap and sacrifice them.

I forgot to mention veteran character actor R.G. Armstrong. He's only in the movie for roughly seven minutes, but he gets third billing, above the title, because the rest of the cast is non-famous children. He's the only adult near Gatlin allowed to continue breathing because our creepy little corn children rely on his gas station and body shop a few miles outside of Gatlin for their fuel, auto part, and mechanic's needs. R.G. tells Burt and Vicky to get the hell out of his gas station, stay the hell away from Gatlin, and get the hell to Hemingford instead. Burt and Vicky initially heed his advice, but after some funny business with the road signs, they end up in Gatlin anyway.

Burt and Vicky are our ostensible heroes, but Burt is kind of a bossy, condescending partner, and Vicky is a bit meek and deferential to Burt, though she gets a few strong moments. It's a little odd seeing Linda Hamilton play someone who does what her man tells her to do after seeing her kick so much ass in the Terminator movies. Burt ends up needing the help of Vicky, Job, and Sarah, but he still acts like he's handling it by himself. Come on, Burt. Acknowledge your peers.

I'm still not quite sure what the hell happened at the end. God, the devil, giant gophers, natural disasters, a minor demon, and/or primitive digital computer effects all seem to have a role to play when the shit goes down. Anyway, I enjoyed myself, and the more I think about it, the more Children of the Corn truly predicts the state of modern United States political discourse. Smug, condescending urban liberals underestimating their opponents' power and danger on one side, deranged rural homicidal evangelical adult babies on the other side, rich guys sitting back and making money off of both of them (it was a low-budget film, but you get the idea; box office success, etc.). If our country still exists in a few years, I encourage someone to actually make one of these movies in Nebraska.

Children of the Corn was director Fritz Kiersch's feature film debut after years of making commercials and working in a variety of technical roles on film sets. His other credits include Tuff Turf, with James Spader and Robert Downey Jr., the extreme motocross movie Winners Take All (character names include Rick Melon, "Bad" Billy Robinson, Goose Trammel, Bear Nolan, and Mongrel), the Oliver Reed-starring sword and sorcery epic Gor, a modern Romeo & Juliet update taking place in the world of teenage surfer gangs called Under the Boardwalk, fighter pilot movie Into the Sun, with Anthony Michael Hall, and two episodes of the Swamp Thing TV series. He continued directing sporadically into the 2000s and 2010s while working full-time in academia. He created the film production departments at both Oklahoma City Community College and Oklahoma City University and taught at the latter. He is currently the associate vice president of academic affairs at Point Park University in Pittsburgh.