The painting that Mary Shelley sees on the wall, and that subsequently comes to life in her dream, is Henry Fuseli's "Nightmare."
After Shelley comes down from the roof and tells of his fascination with lightning, Byron calls him "Shelley, The Modern Prometheus." When it was first published in 1818, Mary Shelley's novel was called "Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus."
Polidori's line "Sleep is nature's balm" comes from a poem by Keats, a contemporary and close friend of both Shelley and Byron.
Other works of literature mentioned in the film are "The Castle of Otranto" by Horace Walpole (regarded as the first Gothic novel), "Vathek" by William Beckford, and "The Monk" by Matthew Lewis, another gothic novel about a corrupt priest.