GOTHIC

Out of that single night came FRANKENSTEIN and THE VAMPIRE – two texts on which modern horror cinema was built. Ken Russell’s GOTHIC is about that very night.

This is no conventional period drama, though. Russell does not attempt to reconstruct the evening with historical fidelity; instead, he stages it as one long collective bad trip. The group starts by reading German ghost stories; then holds a séance, doses themselves with laudanum, and, one by one, comes face to face with whatever each of them fears most. Over the course of the night, it gets harder to tell if there is really something else in the villa, or if the five Romantics have just called up their demons and don't know how to get them back.

Ken Russell, British cinema’s great eccentric and the director of THE DEVILS and ALTERED STATES, had been circling the subject for a decade. When he finally secured a £2 million budget, he shot the film at a Hertfordshire country house standing in for the Swiss villa and let his imagination run wild: he cut the prologue and epilogue from Stephen Volk’s screenplay and added a mechanical mannequin. He also brought together Gabriel Byrne, Julian Sands, Timothy Spall and Natasha Richardson.

Add a synth-heavy score and the result is something close to the cinematic equivalent of an absinthe hallucination. Critics loathed GOTHIC, but devotees of fearless weirdness have made it a cult film.

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Text: dr Grzegorz Fortuna