Theme: Victorian Gaslight Milieu

Victorian Gaslight Milieu concerns works set in and around the Victorian period (1837-1901), usually taking place in England and London. This was a period that produced a great many key genre works, including Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1865), J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872), Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Grey (1890), and H.G. Wells’ classics like The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Dr Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897) and The War of the Worlds (1898), all of which have been multiply filmed.

Not to mention this is also the period in which Sherlock Holmes operates, where the Sweeney Todd story and the works of Charles Dickens – in particular A Christmas Carol (1843) – are set and the real-life Jack the Ripper murders occurred. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) falls outside of this period but is frequently treated as belonging to the Victorian era. The works of Jules Verne take place during this period and screen depictions frequently use a gaslight setting.

Film treatments have created a fantasy realm of fog-laden London streets, aristocrats in hansom cabs, street urchins, ladies in full-length dresses and cheeky Cockney barmaids/dancehall girls, not to mention a whole period design scheme. Many of the efforts from The Anglo-Horror Cycle in particular from Hammer Films prefer this setting. This is also the realm where Steampunk, the fantastical vision of an alternate technology based on Victorian steam inventions, takes place. It is also the period where a number of Age of Exploration Adventure Films take place.