The Bride of Frankenstein: The Creation of the Female Monster (1935)

Describing how he got the assignment to compose the score for The Bride of Frankenstein (Universal, 1935) Franz Waxman wrote in 1964:

I shall be eternally grateful to Erich Pomer. I was a young music student when he hired me in 1930. He gave me my great opportunity – the assignment to write the score for Fritz Lang’s version of Ferenc Molnár’s Liliom staring Charles Boyer.

[Liliom is better known to American audiences in the musical version Carousel.]

We engaged the best orchestra in Paris, rented the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées for the recording and brought in a portable projector so we could synchronize the music. Since the last part of the picture plays in the ‘heaven’ of Liliom’s imagination, I wanted the music to have the spacious sound which today which is achieved by artificial echo, at that time at that time virtually unknown. So I recorded with several microphones, some of which were placed in the dome of the empty theatre, where they picked up the true effects of space and echo. In addition to the full symphony orchestra, I also employed three electronic instruments called ondes martenot. Their weird sound helped to establish a strange atmosphere for Liliom’s heavenly adventure.

When director James Whale saw the scene he knew he had found the composer to score the sequel to his Frankenstein (Universal, 1931). Based on Mary Shelley’s classic horror novel, The Bride of Frankenstein stars Boris Karloff, Elsa Lanchester, and Ernest Thesiger. This was the first extended score for the horror and science fiction genre, and many fans still consider it to be the ultimate. The music was reused by Universal in the late ‘30s and ‘40s in their popular serials Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, and Radio Patrol. Many film buffs have noticed the striking similarity of the 'Female Monster' theme to a hit song from a Broadway show composed 14 years later.

The Bride of Frankenstein was one of the first Hollywood scores to use the symphony orchestra in an impressionistic way, musically depicting the the chilling noises of the horror film laboratory equipment. The erie music coupled with spectacular visual effects on the screen produced new dimension in terror. ‘The Creation of the Female Monster’ is the highlight of the film’s score. It was a ‘super horror’ movie and demanded hauntingly weird and different music.

During 'The Creation of the Female Monster' sequence of the film, an obsessive heartbeat (represented by the timpani) accompanies ghostly string and wind sonorities as the female creature is “born” amidst blinding electrical effects and the tolling of mock wedding bells.

— John W. Waxman