We need more studio horror films like Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride!. She communicates a sort of primordial anger through her film, in which freshly minted Academy Award winner Jessie Buckley plays dual roles as narrator and protagonist: she plays that “bride” mentioned in the title, primarily, while taking time in the margins to portray the spirit of Mary Shelley, the great English novelist responsible for imprinting Frankenstein, or, the Modern Prometheus on culture forevermore in 1818.
It’s a clever concept, even if Gyllenhaal rewards herself for her cleverness while failing to make her cleverness rewarding for viewers. Happily, the universe provided the movies a superior piece of counter-programming in March, when The Bride! premiered. Dead Lover, Grace Glowicki’s own contribution to the grand library of Frankenstein riffs. If we need more studio horror like The Bride!, we need more independent horror like Dead Lover, a film that Glowicki appears to have made on a budget mostly spent on a shopping spree at JoAnn Fabrics’. Dead Lover is homegrown, a “let’s put on a show” type of production, in which Glowicki’s interests as an artist are aided and abetted by a cast made up of her friends and loved ones, and where each of them play such uniformly important parts in the movie’s composition that they make up their own patchwork colossus.
The fact that The Bride! and Dead Lover opened in arms’ reach of each other (March 6 and March 20, respectively) probably isn’t by coincidence, but whether it is or isn’t, the proximity is nonetheless welcome. It’s a chance to think about what these movies have to say between themselves, and importantly, what they have to say to and about the movies of their make and model that came before them. “Weirdo arthouse Frankenstein variants” is an extremely specific niche, but all the same it is a niche. And now’s as good a time as any to dig up a few of the gems contained therein.
Dead Lover
We’ll start, of course, by cheating, because now is also a good time to sing the praises of Dead Lover, which by the end of 2026 will likely remain standing as one of the year’s best horror movies. Being Canadian and independent, Glowicki’s gnarly little festival hit lacks the same spotlight given to a film like The Bride!.
Death’s scent has a way of clinging to folks who work in proximity to it. So it goes for Dead Lover’s malodorous protagonist, credited and addressed only as “gravedigger,” a woman haunted by such a profound stench that she can’t land a man, until comes the day she meets a foppish libertine (Ben Petrie, Glowicki’s frequent collaborator and partner) who finds her bouquet of decay so intoxicating that he falls head over heels for her. When he meets an abrupt and untimely demise, the gravedigger does a little mad science to regrow him from his severed finger.
Dead Lover did the festival rounds all through 2025, starting with Sundance, and opened theatrically this month. A handful of theaters hosted “Stink-O-Vision” screenings, though this is a needless effort. You’ll pick up on the film’s effluvium with your eyes alone. Dead Lover reeks, in the best way, a gross-out slapstick tale of unwholesome love right out of the playbooks of Jean Rollin, Merrie Melodies, and Michele Soavi.
Cemetery Man
Speaking of Soavi, a man without whom this list wouldn’t be complete, here’s Cemetery Man. Like Glowicki’s funky gravedigger in Dead Lover, Francesco Dellamorte (Rupert Everett), Soavi’s hunky leading man, carries out a solitary existence minding the town graveyard in Buffalora, Italy. As is true for anybody in the biz, his work is never done, though this is due as much to the fact of human mortality as the tendency of bodies put to rest on the premises to spring back to life within a week of burial. It’s Francesco’s charge to return them to the dirt. A cycle without end ensnaring a man who’s grown weary of reality. Cemetery Man shares genes with Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive, though given the tiny gap between their releases, it’s unlikely Soavi would cite Jackson as an influence. His film is wildly different. A melancholic blend of the morbid and the erotic, where Jackson’s is a splatterfest. Not so Cemetery Man. Francesco’s mounting moral dilemmas and romantic entanglements add a layer of poetry to Soavi’s gristly surrealism and savage sexuality.
Lady Frankenstein
As often as it’s true that EC Comics’ Tales from the Crypt, and undoubtedly more so the TV adaptation that ran on HBO for seven years in its nascent days, has exerted massive influence over contemporary horror on screen and page, it’s also true that Tales from the Crypt didn’t somehow burst fully formed from the brains of William Gaines, Al Feldstein, and Steven Dodd, the property’s curators across multiple media. The comics, the show, and the movies they inspired have their antecedents. Mel Welles’ superb, and supremely underloved, Lady Frankenstein, for instance, not only carries on Shelley’s literary legacy, but also functions as a blueprint for specific episodes in Tales’ canon, like “The Switch” (featuring guest host Arnold Schwarzenegger!) and of course “The Third Pig”, literally a Frankenstein riff orchestrated through glorious 2D animation. It’s no wonder why Welles’ work echoes in these stories, and throughout Tales from the Crypt in broader terms. The characters are conniving and amoral, ready to backstab one another or commit various barbarities at the drop of a hat, and redeemed only by how well their actors tap into their psychology. It’s a lot of fun. It’s also deeply misanthropic, and that’s all ranked ahead of the unhinged monster mayhem Welles gets up to with his misshapen abomination.
Nekromantik
If Lady Frankenstein indulges in unseemliness, Nekromantik prefers blatant obscenity. It’s impossible to persuade anyone to check this thing out who isn’t already compelled to see it sans encouragement, so let’s put it bluntly. Nekromantik is disgusting. Robert (Bernd Daktari Lorenz), a technician for a trauma cleanup company, and his wife Betty (Beatrice Manowski) match each other’s freak, which would be sweet, maybe even poignant, if their freak wasn’t “doing the horizontal tango with strangers’ corpses.” I warned you. Disgusting. When Robert sees an opportunity to snatch the body of a man who drowned in a lake, he takes it (the opportunity, as well as the body) and goes home to Betty, where the story quickly spirals out of control, or rather, into territory that even avid horror filmgoers might rather steer clear of. Nekromantik isn’t for everybody. (It may even be fair to say that it isn’t for anybody, though this neglects critiques about classism and the AIDS epidemic made by German critics at the time of its release.) But as a relic of horror cinema past, and as a film that remains banned in Iceland, Ontario, Malaysia, and a select few other regions of the world to this day, it’s one not to be ignored.
Frankenhooker
On the lighter side of Shelley-centric fare, a film about a man, his fiancée’s reanimated body, America’s crack epidemic, and the dangers of paying for sex in an overarchingly puritanical society. Frank Henenlotter is arguably the only person on Earth who should have made Frankenhooker on the explicit grounds that his name harmonizes so nicely with its title. Admittedly, his résumé makes a strong case for him, too, being the director of such 1980s trashterpieces as Brain Damage and Basket Case, not to mention Basket Case’s 1990 trashterpiece sequel, Basket Case 2. (There’s a Basket Case 3, but as that came out the year after Frankenhooker, it’s irrelevant for our purposes today.) Can science save amateur mad scientist Jeffrey Franken’s (James Lorinz) beautiful bride-to-be, Elizabeth (Patty Mullen), after her bizarre and untimely death via lawnmower oopsie? Can science do conservative America a solid and slaughter a slew of prostitutes and their pimp while simultaneously disposing of a massive stash of crack? What happens when perverts try to party with a woman who runs on electricity? Frankenhooker is dumber than a bag full of hammers, and has so much fun with its own dumbness as to be irresistibly charming. Its collected thoughts on bodily autonomy and boundaries are icing on the idiot cake.
