Victorian Visual Culture

Mary Shelley originally wrote her hit novel Frankenstein during the Regency period and set it in the recently passed 18th century. The novel is obsessed with death, a theme that would be popularized in the soon-to-come Victorian era. For this reason, many adaptations of Shelley’s fabulous novel are set during the Victorian period in Europe. One such adaptation is the most recent adaptation, Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein.

Del Toro’s adaptation of the classic story adds something that Shelley could not have imagined for her story, a technology that did not exist as she was writing it: photography. The art of photography is prominent throughout the film, a prominent feature in the stories of Frankenstein’s creature and a newly invented character for the film, Heir Harlander.

Harlander introduces photography to the audience. His first scene with the camera shows him creating a “memento mori” image, a popular aesthetic of the Victorian period. The image Harlander is creating, although we never see the final product, is meant to symbolize life and death, showing photography as a budding new art form. Harlander also takes pictures of Frankenstein working on the Creature, documenting the scientist’s progress with his creation. It also speaks to postmortem photography, another Victorian art obsession. While Harlander is not taking photos of someone who has recently passed, he is still photographing a lifeless form, or multiple, depending on the work Frankenstein was currently doing. Harlander’s photography work in this stage of the film is almost twisting postmortem photography on its head. The photographs themselves are documenting something lifeless but Harlander intends to document the process of reanimation, the bringing of life rather than the aftermath of death.

Harlander’s photos still capture death and his and Frankenstein’s obsession with it. It is only through these photos that the Creature, upon discovering them, figures out what he is: a jumbled group of once lifeless body parts sewn together and magically brought back from the dead.

Guillermo Del Toro, dir., Frankenstein, Netflix, 2025.