Trivia

The painting that Mary Shelley sees on the wall, and that subsequently comes to life in her dream, is Henry Fuseli's "Nightmare."

Gabriel Byrne walks with a limp and carries a cane because the real Lord Byron had a club foot.

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."

During one of the establishing shots of the villa at night, a slowly revolving band of light appears on screen. This comes from a "phantasmagoria", a device which displayed pictures by sending light through holes cut in a ring of metal. The book that Shelley and co. read which inspired her to write Frankenstein (and lead to the events in the movie) was also called Phantasmagoria.

Polidori's line "Sleep is nature's balm" comes from a poem by Keats, a contemporary and close friend of both Shelley and Byron.

Ken Russell: on the tour boat with his family at the end of the film.