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In what may be the most outrageous scene in a film full of them, Pretorius meets, and has a kind of business meeting with the Monster in a crypt, where he is hanging out, drinking, and getting himself bombed. The ghost-story writer M. R. James was a master at suggesting the olfactory unpleasantness of the tomb, conjuring the very specific odor of damp earth mingled with limestone. It's that that Jamesian smell that permeates this scene and the rest of the film.The laughter is over at this point. Elsa Lanchester, stripped of her Mary Shelley garb, now makes her return in the laboratory as the brought-to-life, shock-haired Bride, a doozy of a dual-role. We've had our comedy, we've seen how it can feed into terror, and now we move from external terror to a terror of a different kind: the ones that affect the heart. For the Monster's would-be Bride wants nothing to do with him, and Lanchester—who took her inspiration from a pissed-off cat—hisses her complete repulsion, as though the Monster is not even worth a garbled sentence or two.The Monster then refuses to even try to argue, essentially telling his creator to get the hell out of Dodge before he blows everyone up—himself, the Bride, and Pretorius. The knock on the film—such as there is one—is that after being so desperately insistent on finding something even a reanimated corpse could call love, the Monster makes his deathly decision in an instant. Which is to say, his actions give voice to the feelings so many of us have had, that emotional explosion from which it feels there is no return. The unpredictable nature of the human heart is, sometimes, the scariest thing of all.Colin Fleming's fiction appears in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Boulevard, and Black Clock, and he also writes for the Atlantic, Rolling Stone, and the Boston Globe. His newest book, The Anglerfish Comedy Troupe: Stories from the Abyss, is out from Dzanc, and he's also a regular contributor to NPR's Weekend Edition.On Broadly: In a New Horror Movie, Helen Keller Is a Zombie-Fighting Sex Goddess