Taking place immediately after the events of the earlier film, it is rooted in a subplot of the original Mary Shelley novel, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818).

In 1998, it was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the United States National Film Registry, having been deemed "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant".

The scene shifts to the close of the 1931 movie Frankenstein, where villagers gathered around the burning windmill cheer the apparent death of the Monster.

Nursed back to health by Elizabeth, Henry has renounced his creation, but still believes he may be destined to unlock the secret of life and immortality.

Taking refuge from another angry mob in a crypt, the Monster spies Pretorius and his cronies Karl and Ludwig breaking open a grave.

[5] Screenwriter Robert Florey wrote a treatment entitled The New Adventures of Frankenstein — The Monster Lives!, but it was rejected without comment early in 1932.

Frye also filmed a scene as an unnamed villager and the role of "Nephew Glutz", a man who murdered his uncle and blamed the death on the Monster.

[8] Lanchester disliked working with Pierce, who she said "really did feel that he made these people, like he was a god ... in the morning he'd be dressed in white as if he were in hospital to perform an operation".

[9] To play Mary Shelley, Lanchester wore a white net dress embroidered with sequins of butterflies, stars, and moons, which the actress had heard required 17 women 12 weeks to make.

Strickfaden recycled a number of the fancifully named machines he had created for the original Frankenstein for use in Bride, including the "Cosmic Ray Diffuser",[21] and the "Nebularium".

[12] Whale completed his final cut, shortening the running time from about 90 to 75 minutes and re-shooting and re-editing the ending, only days before the film's scheduled premiere date.

Joseph Breen, lead censor for the Hays office, objected to lines of dialogue in the originally submitted script in which Henry Frankenstein and his work were compared to that of God.

Whale agreed to delete a sequence in which Dwight Frye's "Nephew Glutz"[8] kills his uncle and blames the Monster,[1] and shots of Elsa Lanchester as Mary Shelley in which Breen felt too much of her breasts were visible.

[31] Censors in England and China objected to the scene in which the Monster gazes longingly upon the body intended for reanimation as the Bride, citing concerns that it looked like necrophilia.

[33] Universal voluntarily withdrew the film from Sweden because of the extensive cuts demanded, and Bride was rejected outright by Trinidad, Palestine, and Hungary.

Additionally, Japanese censors objected to the scene in which Pretorius chases his miniature Henry VIII with tweezers, asserting that it constituted "making a fool out of a king".

The website's consensus reads: "An eccentric, campy, technically impressive, and frightening picture, James Whale's Bride of Frankenstein has aged remarkably well.

Variety also praised the cast, writing that "Karloff manages to invest the character with some subtleties of emotion that are surprisingly real and touching ... Thesiger as Dr. Pretorious [is] a diabolic characterization if ever there was one ... Lanchester handles two assignments, being first in a preamble as author Mary Shelley and then the created woman.

[41] In another unqualified review, Time wrote that the film had "a vitality that makes their efforts fully the equal of the original picture ... Screenwriters Hurlbut & Balderston and Director James Whale have given it the macabre intensity proper to all good horror pieces, but have substituted a queer kind of mechanistic pathos for the sheer evil that was Frankenstein".

[43] While the Winnipeg Free Press thought that the electrical equipment might have been better suited to Buck Rogers, nonetheless the reviewer praised the film as "exciting and sometimes morbidly gruesome", declaring that "all who enjoyed Frankenstein will welcome his Bride as a worthy successor".

[45] The Times praised the entire principal cast and Whale's direction in concluding that Bride is "a first-rate horror film",[45] and presciently suggested that "the Monster should become an institution, like Charlie Chan".

He described it as "the best of the Frankenstein movies--a sly, subversive work that smuggled shocking material past the censors by disguising it in the trappings of horror.

Ebert also added how Lanchester's character provided "one of the immortal images of the cinema with lightning-like streaks of silver in her weirdly towering hair".

Horror scholar David J. Skal suggests that Whale's intention was to make a "direct comparison of Frankenstein's monster to Christ".

[58] Film scholar Scott MacQueen, noting Whale's lack of any religious convictions, disputes the notion that the Monster is a Christ-figure.

In crucifying the Monster, he says, Whale "pushes the audience's buttons" by inverting the central Christian belief of the death of Christ followed by the resurrection.

Pretorius serves as a "gay Mephistopheles",[14] a figure of seduction and temptation, going so far as to pull Frankenstein away from his bride on their wedding night to engage in the unnatural act of creating non-procreative life.

[63] The Monster, whose affections for the male hermit and the female Bride he discusses with identical language ("friend") has been interpreted as sexually "unsettled" and bisexual.

The monster – the outsider – is driven from his scene of domestic pleasure by two gun-toting rubes who happen upon this startling alliance and quickly, instinctively, proceed to destroy it", writes cultural critic Gary Morris for Bright Lights Film Journal.

[59] The creation of the Bride scene, Morris continues, is "Whale's reminder to the audience – his Hollywood bosses, peers, and everyone watching – of the majesty and power of the homosexual creator".