Shadow of a doubt 1935 full cast3/1/2024 Yes! that is what James Whale did with his new-found free hand, and for this let us never stop singing his name as one of the truly essential American directors of the 1930s. He got his wish, and in the spring of 1935 the world was graced with Bride of Frankenstein, one of history's few sequels that is nearly universally regarded as an improvement over its very successful predecessor, and perhaps the first example of a subgenre that would later come to plague the cinema with just as much intensity as the sequel, although in a much smaller sphere: the horror-comedy. I do not know where exactly this sequel boom began I only know that Universal had been trying to put together follow-ups to its two big horror smashes for some years when James Whale finally agreed to make a second Frankenstein on the single condition that he get to make whatever the hell movie he wanted, as far as the censors would allow, of course. Believe it or not, the sequel was just as robust in the 1930s and 1940s as it is today only most of those films have been lost to history, sucking just as much as the modern sequel but without the built-in audience generator of cable TV and home video. But the Golden Age of the Sequel is not the 2000s, nor was it the 1980s, when every crap movie that could be made for under $15 million was later remade for $10 million with the number "2" stuck to the title. It's easy enough to look around and assume that there have never been so many sequels as plague us in the modern day, and it's true that sequels have never before enjoyed so much box-office clout as they do now. The next two years bore witness to the next pair of the studio's iconic monsters in The Mummy and The Invisible Man I will not at this time be jumping into a consideration of those two franchises, but will instead skip ahead to 1935, when Universal first tasted the sweet fruit of the sequel tree. The massive success of 1931's twin gods, Dracula and Frankenstein, left no doubt that Universal Pictures was Hollywood's home for terror and the paranormal, and the studio flung itself into the burgeoning new genre with glee, whatever lingering moral qualms Carl Laemmle, Sr.
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