“Whale's film, not simply the monster's face or walk, haunts audiences and filmmakers--the torchbearing mob tracking down the monster along the lake or against the wrinkled sky, the brief glimpses of the laboratory tower, the windmill in flames dissolving into a memory as the human figures put behind them the monster's agony. Parodied and plundered, the film makes us return in order to keep it under control and to restore and feed the fantasies it evokes. Reviewings allow us to dominate it, to sympathize with the monster, to see another narrative emerge.
“Karloff's monster becomes the way ‘sound' Hollywood looks back at the ‘primitive' silent product of Expressionist studio constructivism and claims for its new product the completeness, finality and endless inclusion that this film claims for its narrative ‘surround' of domestic society. Panchromatic stock transposes the Expressionist world into a new visual world of subtle grays, but the sound track, supposedly a further filling-in of filmic reality, still evidences the hysteria--in Colin Clive's voice, in the shovel banging coldly on the grave, in the barking dogs echoing overreverberently against the rocks--that sets the teeth on edge in a way that the visual image does not. The result is to make the romantic, supposedly ‘natural' and ‘real' conventions, seem tissues, insubstantial products of a shared madness. Who does not remember the closeup of Henry turning the key to lock his bride in? His gesture is only another version of the studio concept of closing off the world in order to control it, to separate into a divided consciousness the forces that threaten the seemingly rational stability of society.” William Nestrick