It’s that time of year again! Time to celebrate the Resurrection with a weeklong plunge into all things zombie! Here’s the history: In 2008, Dr. Girlfriend and I decided to spend a week or so each year marathoning through zombie films that we’d never seen before, and I would blog short reviews. And simple as that, the Easter Zombie Movie Marathon was born.
For the curious, here are links to 2008, 2009 (a bad year), 2010, 2011, 2012 (when we left the blog behind), 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023.
We’re going quit a ways away from zombies tonight, but bear with us.
After getting a glimpse of James Whale’s cinematic iteration of Mary Godwin, Percy Shelley, and Lord Byron in the opening to The Bride of Frankenstein, Dr. Girlfriend and I decided to shift gears away from the adaptations of Frankenstein and check out an interpretation of those momentous three days of 1816 (which became known as The Year Without a Summer thanks to the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815 causing a long, cold volcanic winter) when the group, along with Mary’s step-sister Claire Clairmont and Byron’s doctor/biographer John William Polidori, decided to pass the time indoors by writing their own ghost stories. Shelley and Byron produced fragments of stories, Shelley’s “A Fragment of a Ghost Story” and Byron’s “A Fragment” – which would later inspire Polidori’s own The Vampyre, according to Christopher Frayling’s book Vampyres: Lord Byron to Count Dracula, “the first story successfully to fuse the disparate elements of vampirism into a coherent literary genre.”
While The Vampyre inspired a literary and cultural infatuation with vampires, eventually leading to Bram Stoker’s Dracula in 1897, it was Mary Godwin – soon to be Shelley – who struck literary gold that long weekend. I highly recommend looking into the lives of everyone involved to get some amazing and tragic insight into each of them, and to provide some context for the next film in this year’s marathon, Ken Russell’s Gothic. There have been other films that have portrayed the events of that weekend, Haunted Summer in 1988 with Alice Krige as Mary, and Mary Shelley (2017) starring Elle Fanning, but for my tastes, only Ken Russell’s imagination, excess, and insanity could really fit the feel of what we’re going for with this annual marathon.
Ken Russell was a film legend, a pioneer of flamboyant and transgressive style, and by 1986, had already become a superstar, directing the Oscar-winning Women in Love (1969), the highly controversial The Devils (1971), The Who’s Tommy (1975), and the ground-breaking and underrated science fiction film Altered States (1980). He had considerable history making documentaries for the BBC, usually adapting biographies of famous composers, and was still working in both film and television when he made the bizarre sexual thriller Crimes of Passion in 1984 starring Kathleen Turner and an inspired Anthony Perkins.
After seeing Crimes of Passion, Al Clark, the head of Virgin Films felt Russell would be the perfect director for the screenplay by first-time screenwriter Stephen Volk – who had been working in advertising. Russell later described the script to the Los Angeles Times as “extremely visual… and the use of laudanum gave me a springboard for my ideas.”
Mary Shelley was played by the late Natasha Richardson, the daughter of Vanessa Redgrave; Percy Bysshe Shelley was played by the late Julian Sands; Gabriel Byrne inhabited the role of Lord Byron. Rounding out the cast was Myriam Cyr as Claire and Timothy Spall as Dr. Polidori.
The film opens with the arrival of Mary, Percy, and Claire to the Villa Diodati in Switzerland, to spend time with Lord Byron, who is living in self-exile (to avoid debts, the scandal of his separation from his wife, and rumors of an incestuous relationship with his half-sister Augusta). Claire had had a brief affair with Byron earlier and seems a bit obsessed, while Mary is uncomfortable with Byron’s casual cruelty and “demonic” nature. Percy, however, is kind of a rock star, with groupies leaping out of the bushes as their boat comes ashore, and we get a glimpse into the angle Russell is going to be taking with the story.
They are introduced to Polidori and then the laudanum comes out and what starts as a night of sexual tension, political and religious debate, and poetry, very quickly turns into a crazed, stormy night of hallucinations, more laudanum, self-mutilation, more laudanum, bi-sexual orgies, more laudanum, and what could be a physical manifestation of their fears, summoned by an impromptu séance. And more laudanum.
Also leeches, imps, goats, automata, eyeball nipples, blasphemy, blood, and lots of mud and rats.
Russell expertly builds and builds the tension with outbursts of poetry and action as the characters spend the night seeing visions of fantastic monsters stalking the grounds and spiral closer and closer to utter insanity and potential suicide. By the end of the night, convinced that they have literally manifested a monster from their fears and anxieties, Mary, Percy, Byron, and a totally unhinged Claire try to perform another séance to banish their creation back to the recesses of their minds. The film captures the hallucinogenic chaos of a night of drug-induced madness so effectively, you might feel like you’re having flashbacks while watching.
But, in a reminder of what life was like back in our twenties, by morning, everyone is back to normal, recuperating with tea and breakfast in the garden. The film closes by cutting to present day, as a tour guide walks a group across the grounds, explaining that Mary’s son William would die three years after that fateful night, Percy would drown in 1822, Byron would die two years after that, and Polidori would commit suicide in London. I guess the light that burns twice as bright, burns half as long, as Lao Tzu and Eldon Tyrell say.
The final shot, of Mary’s dead baby lying beneath the waters, is a hauntingly disturbing vision, as the film implies that Mary’s earlier miscarriage and desire to raise her child from the dead was the inspiration for Frankenstein, but the screenplay does a fantastic job of weaving bits and pieces of Frankenstein lore into the dialogue and actions of the night. This makes Gothic not only an amazing piece of drug culture filmmaking that could just as easily have been about rock bands in the 60s, but an exploration of the creative impulse and how artistic inspiration is a confluence of experiences in bits and bobs, gathering in the subconscious until it spills out in dreams and creation. Gothic may start a little slow and seemingly highbrow, but give it time and let the intensity build to its fever pitch. I may just love this movie.