Gothic (1986)

Ken Russell’s Gothic, released in 1986, is based on the famous real-life events of a three-day period in the summer of 1816 at the Villa Diodati Near lake Geneva when Lord Byron, his mistress Claire Clairmont, Percy Shelley and his mistress (and soon-to-be bride) Mary Godwin and Byron’s personal physician Dr John Polidori amused themselves by reading ghost stories and decided, as a contest, that each of them would write a ghost story. As a result the 18-year-old Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein and Polidori wrote The Vampyre, two of the most influential literary works in history.

With Frankenstein Mary Shelly invented science fiction (in this case with major gothic overtones) and with The Vampyre Polidori invented modern vampire fiction.

It was subject matter that was always going to appeal to Ken Russell. He was fascinated by artistic genius and explored the theme in countless movies. Russell was not interested in worshipful biopics. He was more interested in things like genius as madness, genius thwarted (Savage Messiah), genius betrayed (The Music Lovers) and genius as a self-destructive force (Isadora, Mahler, Dante’s Inferno).

It’s obvious from the start that Russell is going to great lengths to avoid the look and feel of BBC-TV costume dramas and the Merchant-Ivory movies and that he did not want cast members who looked like they belonged in any of those productions. Russell wanted something much wilder and crazier and he wasn’t worried about getting all the period details correct. Claire Clairmont in this movie looks like she’s on the way to a 1980s nightclub.

Percy Shelley is too often imagined as a sensitive, gentle, pallid aesthete. In this movie he’s a complete nutter and much more like the real Shelley - an unstable overgrown selfish spoilt child.

Byron was the first rock star. He lived the rock star lifestyle. Sex, drugs and Romantic poetry.

Wth five neurotic unstable drug-addled individuals stuck indoors with wild storms raging outside, reading too many ghost stories and doing too many drugs they quickly become even crazier than they were to begin with. Their personal demons are soon getting the better of them.

It doesn’t help that Byron is growing bored with Claire. Or that Percy Shelley had had an affair with Claire. There’s a whole web of interlocking jealousies and obsessions.

Claire is getting seriously weird and Shelley is becoming unhinged. They’re both experiencing hallucinations. Pretty soon they’re all experiencing hallucinations.

This movie is Ken Russell excess at its most excessive. Lots of wild off-kilter camera angles and disturbing lighting and then there are the automatons.

This is Ken Russell remorselessly picking apart the dark side of genius, and the Byron-Shelley circle was ideal material. Mary Shelley’s parents William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft were advocates of anarchism, feminism and free love which had predictably catastrophic effects on Mary Shelley, her stepsister Claire Clairmont and on Percy Shelley. These were particularly dangerous ideas for a mind as feeble as Shelley’s. Percy Shelley’s embrace of these doctrines drove his first wife to suicide.

Not only can creative geniuses be profoundly unpleasant people, they can also be profoundly stupid.

The movie is certainly a horror movie. Five awful people descend further and further into a drug-fuelled gothic fiction nightmare world of madness and horror, a nightmare world they have themselves created. They can no longer distinguish between nightmare and reality.

Do creative geniuses need to be mad? Probably not, but there’s no question that many creative geniuses have been trainwrecks as human beings and they’re the geniuses Ken Russell was interested in. The film suggests that it was three days of deranged but talented people tearing themselves apart in an orgy of insanity and excess that gave the world two unquestioned masterpieces, Frankenstein and The Vampyre. Maybe it was worth it from the world’s point of view.

Russell is trying to tie in the crazy goings-on at the Villa with the creation of Frankenstein and The Vampyre. These two works are gradually taking shape in the minds of Mary and Polidori. The five think they’re created a monster that’s haunting them but in fact they’re assisting in the birth of two literary masterpieces (and there is plenty of procreation and child-birth symbolism).

The performances could not be described as good in a conventional sense but they’re the crazed off-the-wall performances that Ken Russell wanted.

Gothic may not quite be top-tier Ken Russell but it deserves a much better reputation. Fascinating and highly recommended.

I have the German Blu-Ray which provides an excellent transfer and offers both English and German language options.