Gothic (1986)

Five go mad on laudanum...

“My Lord, dinner awaits your pleasure…”

I passed the summer of 1816 in the environs of Geneva. The season was cold and rainy, and in the evenings we crowded around a blazing wood fire, and occasionally amused ourselves with some German stories of ghosts, which happened to fall into our hands. These tales excited in us a playful desire of imitation. Two other friends (a tale from the pen of one of whom would be far more acceptable to the public than any thing I can ever hope to produce) and myself agreed to write each a story, founded on some supernatural occurrence.

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, From the Preface to the 1818 Edition.

Jean Du Bois: Vue de l'habitation de Lord Byron à Cologny, Genève [Villa Diodati] circa 1834-1840, hand-coloured aquatint.

I'm obsessed with the Villa Diodati. Or, at least, the events at. A haunted summer. In the tempestuous summer of 1816, Percy Bysshe Shelley, his lover, Mary Godwin and her step-sister, Claire Clairmont, crossed the Alps in search of Lord Byron, in turn on the run from adultery, rumours of incest and sodomy. Claire was pregnant with Bryon's child. In early June, Byron rented the Villa Diodati, a pleasing shuttered villa on the banks of Lake Geneva, accompanied by numerous cats and dogs, his pet monkey, peacock, crow and falcon, and Dr. John Polidori, his personal physician and general hanger-on. The Shelleys 'accidentally' bump into Byron, and the two poets, both painfully shy, become friends, with the Shelley contingent moving into a smaller house, Maison Chapuis, in a gully beneath the Villa Diodati. 1816 was 'the year without a summer'. In April of the previous year, Mount Tambora, the Indonesian volcano, erupted, spewing vast quantities of ash into the atmosphere, unsettling weather patterns worldwide. Throughout the summers of 1815 and 1816, it rained consistently— reducing the Waterloo fields to a quagmire and forcing the Diodati party indoors, to read ghost stories by flickering light. Even by the standards of the day, the young runaways were mad, bad and dangerous to know: radicals, upper-class hippies with an addiction to laudanum and free love (three in a bed, that sort of thing), plus a fascination with the esoteric and arcane. People sometimes forget just how young they were. Mary was eighteen, Polidori twenty-one, Claire twenty-two, Shelly twenty-three, and Byron twenty-eight.

One night, Byron suggested they write a ghost story. ‘“We shall each write a ghost story”, said Lord Byron’. They had been reading from a Fantasmagoriana, a German book of horror stories, translated into French. Several nights later, Mary awoke from a nightmare, ‘I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion…’— and so a legend was born.

Gonzalo Suárez’s Remando al viento aka Rowing with the Wind (1988).

Anyway. Come the late 1980s, Frankenstein, or at least the story of how Frankenstein came to be written, was, all of a sudden, toute la rage. Either that or something was in the water supply. I'm not entirely sure why this was so. But there's Ken Russell's Gothic (1986), Gonzalo Suárez's Remando al Viento, aka Rowing with the Wind (1988) and Ivan Passer's Haunted Summer (1988), starring the desirable Alice Krige as Mary (and the love interest in Chariots of Fire). And The Strange Affair of Frankenstein (1986), a charming old-school documentary presented by the splendidly bearded Anglo-Austrian aristo (he with the Mr Kipling Makes Exceedingly Good Cakes voice), Baron 'Bob' Alexander Symes-Schutzmann von Schutzmannsdorff. It's available to watch on BBC iPlayer.

Henry Fuseli (1741-1825): The Nightmare (1781), Detroit Institute of Arts.