In The Scenario, reporter Kirbie Johnson takes readers behind the scenes of the buzziest movies and TV shows to reveal how the best wigs, special effects makeup, and more are created. For this edition, Johnson spoke with Maggie Gyllenhaal, the director of The Bride!, about how she interpreted the character’s original 1935 look for the modern(ish) day.
Monsters are so back, baby: between last year’s Guillermo del Toro-directed Frankenstein; 2024’s Nosferatu, Dracula, which quietly opened this February, and The Vampire Lestat series coming this June, the masses want monsters.
Now, here comes The Bride!, director Maggie Gyllenhaal’s modern-ish retelling of The Bride of Frankenstein. The Borris Karloff film from 1935 used the titular character’s now-iconic image—elongated hair with puffed-up finger waves, white lightning streaks, and a black lip—to sell the film. But, ironically, she’s only in it for two minutes and doesn’t speak, proof that a strong image can endure. “It’s really her look and her spirit that have captured the cultural imagination,” Gyllenhaal told me during our conversation prior to the film’s release.
The Bride! is a story narrated by the late Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, who possesses the body of a woman named Ida (Jessie Buckley) to tell the stories of a crime boss who committed atrocities against women. This possession ultimately gets Ida killed, but she’s revived after death via electricity by Dr. Cornelia Euphronius (Annette Benning) at the pleas of Frank (né Frankenstein, played by Christian Bale).
Photo: Courtesy of Warner Bros.
Gyllenhaal’s iteration of the bride differs from the original in a variety of ways, namely that she’s actually leading the movie and gets to speak this time. She also had to have an iconic look all her own: bleached out hair, singed eyebrows and white lashes, black bile she literally projectiles onto her face, body, and tongue, leaving stains. “At the same time, it was important to me that she be very real,” Gyllenhall says. “Along with the iconography, there was real truth. [Ida is in] one dress for the entire movie: it gets stained and ripped and sweat in—then we can relate to her and we can relate to [her] wild experience.”
Ida’s look does include some nods to the 1935 Bride of Frankenstein, like the electricity-bleached hair, which mirrors those original white streaks, as well as the finger waves and the black lips. But it couldn’t be an exact replication; it needed to make sense for Ida’s story. “What would happen if she were electrocuted?” says Gyllenhaal. “[Her hair] would turn white: all the hair on her body, eyelashes, eyebrows—all of it white.”
