The Best Steampunk Films and Television

The result is a curious shelf. Some of the best steampunk films were made before steampunk had a name. Some are not pure steampunk at all, but gaslamp fantasy, proto-steampunk, retrofuturist adventure or diesel-adjacent contraption worship. Some have plots held together with Victorian string and actorly conviction. Some have more visual imagination in a single flying machine than other films manage in an entire franchise of computer-generated thunder.

So, rather than pretending this is a neat category guarded by a small man with a clipboard and a monocle, let us treat it as a field guide. These are the films that matter if you want to understand steampunk on screen: the ancestors, the landmarks, the magnificent near-misses and the brass-plated oddities that keep the genre interesting.

The first great ancestor is Georges Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon. Made in 1902, it is not steampunk as we now use the word, but it is pure scientific romance turned into spectacle. A shell is fired into the moon’s eye, astronomers behave like stage magicians with degrees, and cinema discovers that science fiction looks better when it is completely impossible. Without Méliès, half of filmed fantasy would have had to discover whimsy by committee, and nobody wants that.