On Criterion yesterday I watched Gothic, a 1986 film directed by Ken Russell, a fictionalized take on a stormy night in the 1810s where literary friends Lord Byron (Gabriel Byrne), Percy Shelley (Julian Sands), Mary Shelley (Natasha Richardson), and John William Polidori (Timothy Spall) entertained each other by telling horror stories, from which came Shelley’s Frankenstein novel and Polidori’s short story “The Vampyre.” Because this is directed by Ken Russell, the movie is full of erotica and horror and weird visuals, and is a good mix of over the top Gothic horror with real-life literary figures.
It’s a little bittersweet watching Natasha Richardson and Julian Sands together, as both died in tragic ways, Sands only this past year. Sands was good at both playing villains (in Warlock), and playing Percy Shelley and going mad in this horror house that has a dungeon with rats in it. And Natasha Richardson had a romantic beauty to her that feels very Shakespearean, and had a commanding queenly feel to her presence. The movie includes graphic images of her having visions of her miscarriage, so a content warning there.
One of my favorite effects in this is NSFW, but it’s when Percy hallucinates seeing eyes in breasts, so when he sees the bare breasts of his sister in-law, the effects place eyes where her areolas are, and it’s a creepy but good effect.
I liked how over the top this was, and how it made me think of the 1994 film Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, where Kenneth Branagh’s Victor Frankenstein has a similar frantic, mad vibe that Julian Sands as Percy Shelley did, and this film makes clear allusions to the creation of Frankenstein, with Mary wanting to resurrect her dead baby, and Shelley saying “It’s alive” in one scene.
So this was interesting to watch as a British horror film that could go more crazier than the Hammer horror films due to more lax standards on erotica in film, so Ken Russell could go nuts with it.
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