A retro film for spooky season: “Gothic” by Ken Russell (1986).

We’re coming up on Halloween, and, since it’s been a whole month since I did a film-related article here on the Garden I thought I’d introduce you to one of my favorite movies of the spooky season: the bizarre 1986 film Gothic, directed by Ken Russell. I’ve seen this film many times over the years and my husband and I watched it the other night last night on high-def Blu-Ray. (Yes, after being ravaged for years by the abuses of streaming services, I’m pivoting back to physical media). Gothic, which is a fictionalized account of the genesis of Mary Shelley’s classic horror novel Frankenstein, is a film with particular resonance to me: it depicts certain events and conditions that are the subject of my academic research on climate change in the early 19th century, for my doctoral dissertation entitled Ten Years of Winter.

Here’s the backstory, which the movie doesn’t get into. A series of volcanic eruptions beginning in 1809 pumped a lot of stuff—sulfur dioxide, particularly—into the Earth’s atmosphere. This stuff scattered solar radiation, cooled the surface and turned the weather over much of the world cold and disagreeable. The summer of 1816 occurred at the height of this effect. In June that year, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and his girlfriend (later wife) Mary, Byron’s lover Claire Clairmont, and his doctor John Polidori rented a luxury villa on Lake Geneva called the Villa Diodati for summer vacation. Because the weather conditions were so bad, their plans of picnicking and yachting were ruined. They were forced to stay indoors with fires blazing, and to amuse themselves they told ghost stories. This was how Mary came up with Frankenstein, Polidori hatched The Vampyr and Lord Byron came up with his poem “Darkness.”