The Bride trailer reveals how Maggie Gyllenhaal fixed ‘some major problems’ with the original Frankenstein sequel

‘Well, what about her? That's what this movie really gets into’

“I don’t want this. I don’t want any of this.” If Elsa Lanchester had been given any dialogue in 1935’s science fiction horror classic, The Bride of Frankenstein, she probably would have said something similar. Instead, these words come from Jessie Buckley, who plays the title character in Maggie Gyllenhaal's upcoming adaptation The Bride!

Buckley’s haunting words kick off the film’s first full trailer, which dropped on Tuesday. During a Q&A event we attended ahead of the premiere, Gyllenhaal explained how she got the initial idea to make this movie and what she wants to get right that the original got wrong.

In rethinking the Universal Monster movie, Gyllenhaal was inspired by a tattoo. “I was at a party and I saw a man with a tattoo on his whole forearm of The Bride of Frankenstein,” she recalls. Realizing that she’d never actually seen the movie, she went back to her hotel room and watched it — and quickly realized something felt off.

“Elsa Lanchester, the original Bride of Frankenstein, just has this impact — the way she looks… something about her is formidable,” Gyllenhaal said. “And then I watched the movie and I realized: she doesn't speak.”

Gyllenhaal sets out to correct this by giving Buckley’s character not just plenty of dialogue, but also a lot more agency. In the trailer, while the monster (Christian Bale) calls her the “Bride of Frankenstein,” she corrects him: “Just the bride.”

At the same time, the director admits that Lanchester’s character does have some agency in her rejection of the monster.

“She's kinda badass,” the director says. “She wakes up and says, ‘no.’ I mean, that's basically what she does and that's unusual. So I was like, What can I do with that? How can I take this idea, which has fundamentally got some major problems with it?”

To be clear, Gyllenhaal isn’t trying to sideline Frankenstein’s monster, and Bale appears to play a major role in the film based on this trailer. She describes his character as “beautiful, human, kind and so lonely,” which is why he asks his creator to make him a girlfriend. Of course, this raises a critical question that the original Bride of Frankenstein never really tries to address.

“Well, what about her? That's what this movie really gets into,” Gyllenhaal says. “What if she comes back and she has her own needs and her own agenda and her own wants and her own terrors?”

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The Bride! releases in theaters on March 6.