Guillermo del Toro’s long-awaited adaptation of Shelley’s cautionary tale arrived on Netflix last November, and its most striking innovation is transforming a fleeting mention of Edinburgh in the novel into a living, breathing centrepiece in the film. In the original material, Victor stops briefly in the city before isolating himself on a remote Scottish isle to create a female companion for the Creature. Shelley affords the city only a few lines – albeit ones tinged with admiration: ‘I visited Edinburgh with languid eyes and mind… the beauty and regularity of the new town of Edinburgh, its romantic castle and its environs, the most delightful in the world.’
Del Toro captures this sliver of description and expands it into a full thematic landscape. Speaking to Film Edinburgh, he credited the city as enabling “the birth of modern medicine in so many ways,” and went so far as to call the production “the single most gratifying experience I’ve had shooting outside of America.” Edinburgh’s layered past — its Enlightenment intellectualism, its distinction as the first UNESCO City of Literature, its grisly scientific history, and its Gothic urban fabric — provides the ideal backdrop for del Toro’s re-imagining of Shelley’s tale — where the dangers of unchecked experimentation and empathy’s collapse are drawn into unflinching, atmospheric focus.
To understand why del Toro seized upon Edinburgh so readily, it helps to step directly into the city’s own history of medical brilliance and horror. I went along to the Surgeons’ Hall Museums myself — partly because del Toro had gone, but mostly because it felt impossible to write about Frankenstein and Edinburgh without confronting the anatomical reality on which the city built so much of its reputation.
Inside, the place reads like a catalogue of Edinburgh’s medical lineage: James Young Simpson, the Edinburgh Seven, Sir Charles Bell, John Barclay, Joseph Lister, the Munros, even Joseph Bell (Conan Doyle’s model for Sherlock Holmes). Threaded through the achievements is the inescapable darkness: dissection as punishment; grave-robbing paraphernalia; tumour casts; and the unsettling precision with which severed limbs have been preserved, labelled, and displayed. In these galleries, Victor Frankenstein’s hubris suddenly feels less like Gothic invention and more like the inevitable endpoint of a culture that reduced human bodies to specimens.
And then, of course, there was Burke and Hare — sixteen (minimum) murders between 1827-28, their victims’ bodies sold to Dr Robert Knox’s anatomy school in Surgeons’ Square. Edinburgh was once so ravenous for cadavers that graveyards employed night watchmen to keep the newly dead from being carried off. Benjamin Bell’s proud declaration that ‘medicine is taught in Edinburgh in greater perfection than in any other part of Europe’ reverberates through the museum, but it’s equally clear that this perfection came at a considerable human, and moral, cost.
After leaving the Surgeons’ Hall Museums, it became impossible not to see the city itself as something del Toro had dissected and reassembled. Here are some of the key sites where the city’s real past and del Toro’s adaptation fold into one another:
Canongate Toolbooth
An evocative pocket of nineteenth-century life, all cobblestones and shadowed wynds. It’s easy to see why the production team seized upon its textures.
Lady Stair’s Close, Lawnmarket
Victor (Oscar Isaac) follows Elizabeth (Mia Goth) through this narrow, atmospheric alley, its steep walls and shadowed corners aptly suited to del Toro’s Gothic vision.
Makars Court, Lawnmarket
In the film, Makars’ Court becomes the site of public executions and the grim selection of corpses for Victor’s experiments. In reality, it’s a national literary monument, its flagstones inscribed with lines from great writers. The choice is fascinating: here, the city’s creative brilliance exists alongside a capacity for moral transgression.
St Giles Cathedral, West Parliament Square
The cobbled square outside St Giles was transformed into a 19th century marketplace, bustling with period detail, as Victor strides through it in pursuit of Elizabeth. The film’s credits explicitly thank St Giles’ Cathedral, cementing Edinburgh’s role in the film’s visual identity.
Bakehouse close, Canongate
This close in Canongate – familiar to Outlander fans – serves as the exterior of Henrich Harlander’s home. Harlander, portrayed by Christoph Waltz, is one of del Toro’s most compelling additions: a wealthy, war-profiteering patron dying of syphilis. Outside his house, the set is drenched in fake blood and strewn with dead animals, a gruesome testament to the city’s historical obsession with dissection and death – realities that Harlander himself attempts to elude through his exploitation of Victor.
Signet Library, West Parliament Square
After the church confessional booth scene (filmed in Glasgow Cathedral), Victor and Elizabeth share supper and a dance in the library’s stunning upper room. The library’s grandeur, and the refined behaviours performed within, feels almost deceptive, a polished surface that conceals the tenebrosity of ambition, obsession, and ethical compromise which constitute the film’s central themes.
Del Toro and production designer Tamara Deverell also visited the Wallace Monument (Stirling), St Stephen’s Church (Stockbridge), and the Scott Monument (Princes Street) – not as filming locations, but as sources of architectural and artistic inspiration. It’s apt, then, that the ultimate laboratory tower was itself created from borrowed parts, assembled specifically for the film.
Edinburgh is not merely a filming location but an essential organ in the body of del Toro’s Frankenstein – a city whose own history of brutality and inquiry, serves as Victor’s intellectual double: brilliant, restless, and perilously sure of its own ingenuity.
Cover Photo by Jure Tufekcic on Unsplash.
Photos used in this article were taken and provided by Olivia Wharam-Lewis for The Student.
