queer film • jersey city

Hello Film Club member,

 

If Wikipedia is to be believed, well over 450 feature films include “some version or interpretation” of Frankenstein’s monster, with Guillermo del Toro’s 2025 Oscar-winning picture (for makeup and hairstyling, costume, and production design), being the most recent. Needless to say, Mary Shelley’s story, written in 1818 when she was just 18, has wildly captured our imaginations for over 200 years. 

 

The first Hollywood director to take a cinematic shot at the novel was James Whale in 1931, creating the most indelible film interpretation of Frankenstein. It was so popular that Universal enlisted Whale to give the monster a bride four year’s later in the sequel. As Whale was openly homosexual, something almost unheard of in Hollywood at the time, many, including Vito Russo (The Celluloid Closet), have speculated on gay undertones in Whale’s Frankenstein films. 

 

Gods and Monsters (1998), with direction and an Oscar-winning screenplay by Bill Condon (Dreamgirls, Kiss of the Spider Woman), explores these tensions in this fictionalized account of the last days of Whale’s life, starring a young Brendan Fraser (The Whale) and Oscar-nominated performances by Lynn Redgrave and Sir Ian McKellen as the declining filmmaker. How does perhaps the most famous director of ugly monsters react when confronted with someone he sees as the epitome of male beauty?

 

(Please see below links to In the Life interviews with Ian McKellen and a 1998 story on Gods and Monsters.)

 

Watch the film on Apple TV or Prime Video.

 

Links for further viewing:

In the Life story on Gods and Monsters (scroll forward on timeline to 40:55)

John Catania interviews Ian McKellen (full unedited interview 1994)

Charles Ignacio interviews Ian McKellen about Gods and Monsters (full unedited interview, 1998)