Technicolour Victoriana:
Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein
Artwork by Josse Mansilla (2025) Del Toro’s reimagining of Mary Shelley’s modern myth begins by going back to its source material. A Danish ship is stuck in the Arctic Circle on an expedition to the North Pole. The injured Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) is found near-dead on the ice, pursued by the Creature (Jacob Elordi),…
I can help you get your content back! This sounds like it could be a theme issue or a display problem rather than your content actually being deleted. First, let’s check if your content is still there – go to your dashboard and click on “Pages” to see if your pages are still listed there. Are you seeing your pages in the dashboard, or are they completely missing?
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All of our published text on the website has disappeared from our pages. How do we get it back?
I can help you get your content back! This sounds like it could be a theme issue or a display problem rather than your content actually being deleted.
First, let’s check if your content is still there – go to your dashboard and click on “Pages” to see if your pages are still listed there. Are you seeing your pages in the dashboard, or are they completely missing?
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They’re all still there – also, I meant to say from individual articles rather than pages.
Got it! So your posts are still in your dashboard but the content isn’t showing when you view the individual articles on your site.
Let’s check one thing – when you go to Posts in your dashboard and click “Edit” on one of your articles, can you see all the content there in the editor? This will help me figure out if it’s a display issue or something else.
MoreSources
yes
Perfect! So your content is safe in the editor – this is likely a template issue where the Content block got removed from your post template.
Go to Appearance → Editor → Templates and look for “Single Post” or “Post” template. Click on it and check if there’s a Content block in the template. If it’s missing, that’s why your article content isn’t displaying on the live site.
Do you see the Content block in your post template?
MoreSources
How do I go to Appearance?
From your WordPress.com dashboard, look for “Appearance” in the left sidebar menu – it should be listed along with other options like Posts, Pages, and Media.
If you don’t see it there, you might be in wp-admin instead. Try going to thecamerapublication.com/wp-admin and look for “Appearance” in that left menu. Can you find it now?
MoreSources
I thinl there are content blocks… how do I know for sure?
Great! To confirm it’s a Content block, click on the block and look at the block toolbar that appears above it. You should see “Content” as the block name, or in the right sidebar it will say “Content” at the top of the block settings.
The Content block usually shows placeholder text like “This is the Post Content block, it will display all the blocks in any single post or page” when you’re editing the template. Does that match what you’re seeing?
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Artwork by Josse Mansilla (2025)
Del Toro’s reimagining of Mary Shelley’s modern myth begins by going back to its source material. A Danish ship is stuck in the Arctic Circle on an expedition to the North Pole. The injured Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) is found near-dead on the ice, pursued by the Creature (Jacob Elordi), wrapped in a charred black cloak. Carried aboard and propped up in the captain’s cabin, Victor tells his story.
What follows is one hundred and twenty million dollars of technicolour Victoriana: lavish costumes, horse-drawn carriages, intricate but somehow intangible CGI sets and landscapes. Flashes to Victor’s past reveal a familiar backstory – that of the misunderstood, male ‘Romantic genius’, abused by his father (Charles Dance) and besotted with his mother (Mia Goth). As the film continues, the plot’s connection to the novel becomes somewhat looser. In a move perhaps more pertinent to our own times, wartime arms dealer Henrich Harlander (Christoph Waltz) bankrolls Victor’s scientific research and the building of a vast laboratory, eventually destroyed by fire.
Significantly, however, del Toro’s changes depart from the novel’s verisimilitude: in this version, Frankenstein is differentiated from humans by his supernatural healing powers. The six-foot-seven Creature spends much of the early, inarticulate part of his life chained in the basement by Victor, until he is freed when a fire destroys the laboratory. Though the switch to the Creature’s perspective is handled more clumsily than in the novel, it does manage to capture a sense of conflicting sympathies even when Victor’s position grows less and less tenable.
Throughout the film, del Toro doubles down on melodrama and cliché—the Creature reads Percy Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’, wolves attack and kill the blind man (the Creature’s teacher and only friend), Victor and the Creature have a terribly on-the-nose discussion about who is the real ‘monster’ and the credits are introduced by a cursive quote attributed to Byron. Despite Elizabeth’s compassion for the Creature, and her several excellent scenes with Victor over dinner and in a confession booth, the film is dominated by destructive relationships between men. In the current age of AI, its story of unchecked ‘reason’ and ambition feels like a warning. It may be telling that Victor never stops to think about the consequences of his actions.
The Camera 