Gothic

Was this a story of Mary Shelly's inspiration for Frankenstein. It could be, but that is not what makes it interesting.

It is not your usual horror film. It is more for those who dwell in the surreal world fueled by opiates.

Shelly (Julian Sands), Mary Shelly (Natasha Richardson), and her half-sister Claire (Myriam Cyr) travel to Lord Byron's (Gabriel Byrne) estate where his biographer (Timothy Spall) is staying. They enter into a realm of drug-induced fantasy, where they conjure up their greatest fears.

It was a mess, wandering all over the place, but it certainly kept my interest.

I guess if you were Ken Russell in 1986, riding a crest of weirdity, you can do just about anything you want. I think that Russell was the first really wacko film director I got to know. I hadn't watched anything of his for a long time. This is one of those things that allows this director to take complete license. You have true historical figures who come together in the house of Lord Byron, a really colorful character. The lives of these people come out of boredom. They are misunderstood and a bit spoiled. So, according to Russell, they sit down one night and begin to tell their best horror story. This leads to a series of debauches, hallucinations, whatever. It is filled with images and sex and masochism and anything that the director could throw in there. Now, because you are producing in an accepting time, you can get away with all that. I guess I would watch this again, knowing what the whole of the thing presents, but when you play by no rules other than to do what you want, the results are like throwing paint on a canvass. We get a lot of paint, a lot of color, but no motif. So, while I thought this was a real head trip, I'm not so sure there is much coherence or even meaning to it.

I've only seen two of Ken Russell's films (Gothic and Lair of the White Worm), but if they are anything to go by, he is one of the best horror directors of all time. It is so nice to see someone going against the mould and not making predictable slasher films or Hollywood 'Sixth-Sense' style horror-thrillers.

It is about the weird night that Mary Shelly and her poet brother spent with Lord Byron, which supposedly inspired her to write Frankenstein.

It is filled with hallucionations and erotic weirdness which bridges it much closer to the work of David Lynch or Cronenberg than to the traditional horror film.

I absolutely loved this film and can't recommend it enough. Even if you hate it, you can't deny that it's an experience! 5/5

Films like Gothic, directed by Ken Russell, will not be to most people's taste. Russell is noted for a skewed view of life with very twisted imagery, such as his invariable trademark snake that slithers around in all his films. In this particular film he has devised a story that touches on reality in an unreal way as he brings the famous night that Percy Shelly, Mary Shelly, he half-sister Claire, Lord Byron and Dr. John Polidori spent together that brought about two of the great horror stories of all time about as a result. Between debauchery and Opium laced nightmares this could have been very much what it was really like as this quintet of famous or rather infamous people got together and brought the birth of a new kind of literature, years before Edgar Allen Poe began his writing. Polidori's "The Vampyre" which for many years was attributed to Byron was the forerunner and inspiration for Bram Stoker's Dracula. Of course, Mary Shelly was to go on and write "Frankenstein." This is how it could have happened.

This feature is intense and not for everyone. Definitely not for young people. But a true intellectual's horror tale.

On a dark and stormy night, in a remote, but lavish country estate, in an equally distant Victorian mansion there resides the charismatic, but often eccentric, Englishman, Lord Byron (Gabriel Byrne). Staged for an exercise in humanistic logic, scientific philosophy and creative writing, he gathers an odd assembly of thrill seeking Bohemian characters. Among the notables, are poet Percy Shelly, his author wife Mary, his personal physician, and of course their host, Lord Byron. Beginning with a blasphemous premise that they are imbued with the power to create life itself, Byron suggests they abandon their earthly inhibitions of morality and civil conviction and drink a concentrated draft of Laudium laced wine. The terrifying after effects manifest themselves in the literal passages later found in the poetic works of Percy Shelley or his wife's most famous novel Frankenstein. With a storm raging high above them, the group evokes sacred beliefs, sacrilegious rites and amoral concepts which create a frightening spectral atmosphere that nearly consumes them. Anyone seeking the foundation of the most popular Gothic monster ever created, should view this film. ****