It is the first horror sequel to pick up immediately where the previous film left off and that is only one countless traditions established by this movie. The Monster is dead and Frankenstein and Elizabeth are free to resume their wedding, or so it would seem. The Monster survives and escapes into the forest, a persecuted, hunted thing wherever he goes. In the first film, he was somewhere between an innocent child and a frightened animal, lost and let loose on a world he barely knew and couldn’t possibly understand. The second film does a very different thing, spending time with him, truly allowing the audience to see his persecution through his own eyes, as he learns to speak and to understand both the world around him and his own horrible, unique condition.
This is still, for my money, maybe the best horror sequel ever made. It set the template for everything that followed. By and large, horror sequels tend to do one of three things: they go darker, they go funnier, or they go bigger and expand the world. BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN somehow does all three, it is every kind of sequel and yet never loses itself or feels anything but meticulously and deliberately crafted. The subtext present in the original is deeper here and explicit as it gets for 1935, as Frankenstein meets another mad scientist, more flamboyant and eccentric, who has no interest in toning himself down to appease societal standards. Some classic elements from the novel missing from the previous version (specifically the Monster's ability to speak and the blind old man) are present in this one. Karloff's achingly empathetic portrayal of the monster is punctuated by the cruelest act he commits in either movie (spoilers for a 90 year old movie) killing a woman made specifically to appease him, moments after she's born, just for rejecting him.
With barely five minutes of screen time, though, the true star is Elsa Lanchester in a dual role as both The Bride and Mary Shelley herself. Her newborn, startled, deer-like performance as The Bride is one of the best in horror history, even in just a few minutes. THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN is one of the best to ever do it, a Gothic masterpiece of loneliness and the heartache that comes from being rejected by society and even your peers. It's a treatise on the doomed nature of being an outsider too strange for other outsiders.