It’s one of the more famous parties in literary history. One night in the summer of 1816, disgraced but best-selling poet George Gordon, Lord Byron, along with his physician John Polidori, hosted a group of new friends: radical poet Percy Shelley, his lover Mary Godwin (calling herself “Mary Shelley” though technically not yet married to Percy, himself still married to another woman), and Mary’s step-sister Claire Clairmont (who at the time was pregnant from an earlier assignation with Byron). Byron read from a book of ghost stories, which apparently affected Percy Shelley to the point that he had a vision of a woman with eyes in her breasts and ran shrieking from the room. At some point Byron suggested everyone in the group write a ghost story of their own.
Clairmont and Percy Shelley didn’t write anything, and Byron produced a semi-autobiographical narrative fragment. Polidori took some of the incidents of Byron’s fragment, and expanded it into a story about a hapless Englishman meeting a charismatic, sinister aristocrat who turns out to be a ghost with a thirst for human blood: a vampire, for the first time imagined as a mysterious and romantic nobleman. As for Mary Shelley, she wrote the greatest of all gothic novels, Frankenstein.
Victor Frankenstein and his monster have haunted prose fiction, the modern world, and cinema ever since. So too has Polidori’s tale, “The Vampyre,” whose central character, based on the popular image of Byron himself, was a direct inspiration for Count Dracula. It’s not surprising that Ken Russell, enfant terrible of British cinema, wanted to make a movie about that evening at the Villa Diodati; it’s only surprising that he didn’t get around to it until 1986, when he was offered the chance to direct a script by Stephen Volk titled Gothic.
Russell apparently viewed his film as a black comedy, though that’s a little difficult to see now. Intervening decades have normalized horror-film conventions to the point that Russell’s ironic approach reads only as the heightened reality of genre. The key is that he embraced the horror aesthetic rather than the low-key approach of, say, a Merchant-Ivory historical drama. There’s a distinctive extravagance to the movie, which uses history as a leaping-off point for a fantasia that is gothic in nature as well as name.
The movie, running a lean 88 minutes, begins with the Shelleys and Clairmont arriving at the Villa Diodati, and quickly introduces the main cast of characters—the brooding and Satanic Byron (Gabriel Byrne), foppish and foolish Polidori (Timothy Spall), idealistic but posh Percy Shelley (Julian Sands), flighty Claire Clairmont (Myriam Cyr), and wearily exhausted Mary Shelley (Natasha Richardson). They drink laudanum (opium dissolved in wine), read ghost stories, and conduct a seance. Then wonder if they succeeded in conjuring a spirit. As the night unfolds, with soap-operatic sexual exploits and increasingly surreal incidents, it comes to seem that something has it in for the residents of the Villa Diodati.
The movie has fun working reality into the schema of a horror movie, with Mary Shelley as an unlikely final girl. The characters aren’t attempts to imagine people as they really were, but cartoons that are recognizable as the people they’re caricaturing. Drugs and sex and madness are dialed up to 11, but it’s quick-moving enough that the story works.
It also holds together as a coherent plot in a way that wasn’t always the case for Russell. There are subplots more-or-less relevant to the overall story—Polidori’s religious fears, Mary’s grief at the death of her first baby, Claire’s fixation on Byron—but rather than extended set-pieces there are striking moments, often surreal incidents involving Byron’s menagerie of animals. There are horror-movie sequences, whether in a deserted barn, or a stone-walled basement, or Byron’s sybaritic bedchamber. But these are integrated into the story, moving the plot forward.
The French call a drama about characters stuck together in a confined space a huis clos, and that’s what this is. The Villa’s a large location, but the characters can’t get away from it, and it evokes the limited settings of more conventional horror films. Russell uses the bounded place to put pressure on characters he’s already chosen to draw larger than their actual life.
Those lives were large to start with. He does choose to play Mary Shelley as the voice of reason, arguably underplaying her real strangeness. Byron, on the other hand, is as mad, bad, and dangerous to know as he ever was in life. Gabriel Byrne’s performance almost overshadows Julian Sands as Percy Shelley, but the movie works because Russell and Sands make Shelley live as a bundle of contradictions: optimistic yet thoughtless, feverish with love yet occasionally uncaring. His relationship with Byron feels right, though Russell unsurprisingly chooses to amplify the homoerotic implications.
Russell strikes a tone that is, at least in some ways, precisely appropriate to his subject. It’s Romantic and Gothic but not all the way to Decadent. The idea of a spirit haunting the Villa is a strong plot point that Russell uses judiciously, avoiding a concrete monster to show extreme characters pushing themselves to the edge of sanity.
If the ending falls a bit flat, that’s a habit of Russell’s, emphasizing the irony of what he’s doing. It’s harder to see the irony now, maybe, than in 1986. But Gothic is still a perfect Russell piece, a heady brew of great artists, romanticism, and striking images, with themes of sex and love and god and death and social class all bound together.