Susan Sontag: Notes on Camp: 1964: The Partisan Review
You thought it (camp) meant a swishy little boy with peroxided hair, dressed in a picture hat and a feather boa, pretending to be Marlene Dietrich? Yes, in queer circles they call that camping. … You can call [it] Low Camp…
Susan Sontag: The Partisan Review 1964
High Camp is the whole emotional basis for ballet, for example, and of course of baroque art … High Camp always has an underlying seriousness. You can’t camp about something you don’t take seriously. You’re not making fun of it, you’re making fun out of it. You’re expressing what’s basically serious to you in terms of fun and artifice and elegance. Baroque art is basically camp about religion. The ballet is camp about love …
Susan Sontag: The Partisan Review 1964
DIRECTOR: James Whale
James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein remains one of the cinema’s purest expressions of what Susan Sontag would later define as high camp. Elsa Lanchester becomes an instant icon in the title role, crowned with the most inventive coiffure in film history. Opposite her, the wonderfully mannered Ernest Thesiger—openly gay and once sketched by John Singer Sargent in 1911—delivers his definitive performance as Dr. Pretorius, the slyly queer mentor who coaxes Frankenstein back into forbidden creation.
One of the greatest sequels ever made, The Bride of Frankenstein is an improvement on director Whale’s original Frankenstein (1931) and is now widely regarded as his masterpiece. The famous hermit scene is one of the most extraordinary, tonally daring passages in all of classic horror, a moment of warmth and moral clarity dropped into a film otherwise defined by gothic grotesquerie. It’s also James Whale’s most nakedly personal sequence. The Monster, wounded and hunted, stumbles into the cabin of a blind hermit (Australian actor O.P. Heggie, immortalized in a single scene). The hermit, unable to see his appearance, welcomes him with kindness. He teaches the Monster words — “friend,” “good,” “bad,” “bread,” “wine” — and offers him shelter, food, music, and prayer. For a brief moment, the Monster experiences companionship and dignity. The idyll is shattered when two hunters intrude, recognize the Monster, and panic. The Monster flees, and the hermit’s cabin is accidentally set ablaze.
food good, fire bad
THE MONSTER (BORIS KARLOFF) IN THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN
Whale arrived in Hollywood on the strength of R. C. Sherriff’s Journey’s End, and Carl Laemmle quickly signed him to a five‑year Universal contract. What followed was one of the studio’s most artistically fertile eras. In rapid succession, Whale directed Waterloo Bridge, Frankenstein, The Old Dark House, The Invisible Man, and ultimately The Bride of Frankenstein—a run that helped define Universal’s golden age of horror and elevated the genre’s visual and thematic sophistication.
His momentum faltered with The Road Back (1937), Erich Maria Remarque’s sequel to All Quiet on the Western Front. The film’s troubled reception marked a turning point, and by 1941 Whale’s Hollywood career had effectively concluded.
The premise of Bride of Frankenstein draws from Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel. The film opens with Shelly (Lancaster doing double duty), her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley (Douglas Walton who, nine years later, would play the doomed, but always sweet-smelling, queer Sidney Marriott in Murder My Sweet) and Lord Byron (Gavin Gordon) in the year without a summer (1816) on the shores of Lake Geneva. The film also serves as a direct continuation of Whale’s 1931 adaptation of Frankenstein expanding the myth with wit, melancholy, and unmistakable queer sensibility.
With E.E.Clive, Valerie Hobson, Una O’Connor and Mary Gordon.
Cinematography: John J. Mescall
Music: Franz Waxman
Universal Pictures
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