Bride of Frankenstein, 1935

Yes, I’ve included another James Whale film in my marathon. I wanted to balance some of these earlier queer films with later ones for contrast and to show the evolution of queer-type characters in horror films throughout the years. Most people probably wouldn’t consider Bride of Frankenstein to be a queer film, but this is what BFI’s Alex Davidson had to say about it:

“Some critics sneer at the queer reading as being a modern folly, but the film’s sensibility is undeniable, while Whale and Thesiger (and, it has been rumoured, Clive) were gay. A 1936 novelisation of the film made Pretorius’s leanings clearer still. Elsa Lancaster’s astonishing appearance as the Bride didn’t spawn a thousand drag imitators, but it should have” (2018).

In this sequel to Whale’s Frankenstein (1931), the character of Dr. Septimus Pretorius is played in Thesiger’s high-camp style, and he is able to lure Dr. Frankenstein out of bed with his lady to come down to the lab and do science stuff with him instead. That’s pretty gay for 1935. Also, the monster himself, as Crucchiola (2018) explains:

. . .ends up the selfless hero, which became something of a trope in early horror: As Benshoff writes in Monsters in the Closet, “Many eschewed the ‘normal’ couple all together and instead focused solely on their queer protagonists, suggesting, as will the horror films of later decades, that it is the monster queer whom the audience really comes to see and identify with, and not the heterosexual heroes and heroines.”