Doctor Praetorius
Ernest Thesiger
The Bride of Frankenstein
The seething, slimy villain of gay director James Whale‘s classic horror film was played by a closeted and married actor, and the titular Bride was herself married to a gay man (Charles Laughton). What a set that must have been! Praetorius is basically the end-all of gay-seeming super villains, and the film’s attack on the institution of marriage is pretty hard to ignore. Whale set out to make a camp comedy follow-up to his classic horror film Frankenstein, and with the help of Praetorius, he succeeded in spades — were it not for the undercurrent of dark humor in the film, this character would have been much more difficult to tolerate. It’s notable that The Rocky Horror Picture Show – which aimed to reclaim many of the sci-fi and horror genres’ tropes for a transgressive audience – clearly used both Praetorius and Whale’s The Old Dark House as models for its mayhem.
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