Draped in a floor-length white gown, sporting a precisely stitched jawline and blowout hairdo with that now-famous ripple of white, the Bride of Frankenstein catches her first breath of life, her eyes darting around the laboratory. The Monster descends a staircase, hand outstretched. “Friend?” he beckons. She shrieks in terror, turning away. The subtext: “Oh no, I know this man is not for me!”
The Monster’s bride is “one of the most explicit queer-coded characters to exist,” says producer-director Bryan Fuller, whose four-part docuseries Queer for Fear premiered this month on Shudder. The premise of a woman rejecting what society expected at the time — marriage to a man — is queer even by today’s standards.
Yet after decades of queer theorists reading into horror films, filmmakers are finally exploring queerness out in the open, without having to bury it in subtext.