A Child and a Monster go to the Lake, or …“What shall we throw in now?”

Set in central Spain shortly after the Spanish revolution, Victor Erice’s film The Spirit of the Beehive opens with the children of a rural village watching James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931). Two of the children, sisters Ana and Isabelle, watch wide-eyed as the monster encounters a young girl by a mountain lake. It’s the same scene you’ll find restaged for laughs in Mel Brook’s Young Frankenstein (1974), but here it’s played straight. The result is at once moving and confounding, leaving the vie...