Gothic backdrop
Gothic poster

GOTHIC

1987 GB HMDB
February 27, 1987

Living on an estate on the shores of Lake Geneva, Lord Byron is visited by Percy and Mary Shelley. Together with Byron's lover Claire Clairmont, and aided by hallucinogenic substances, they devise an evening of ghoulish tales. However, when confronted by horrors, ostensibly of their own creation, it becomes difficult to tell apparition from reality.

Cast

Gabriel Byrne, Julian Sands, Natasha Richardson, Myriam Cyr, Timothy Spall, Alec Mango, Andreas Wisniewski, Dexter Fletcher, Pascal King, Tom Hickey
Horror

REVIEWS (1)

MC

Marco Castellini

We are in the nineteenth century, two eccentric poets, one of whom is Lord Byron, decide to have a séance with their respective lovers; the result is strange apparitions of snakes, rats, leeches, ghosts, and corpses. After the night everything seems to return to normal, but a tragic fate looms over them... The eccentric Ken Russell directs, as usual, a baroque and "excessive" film, which however is not as successful as his previous "I Diavoli". The cast is decent (in which we find Gabriel Byrne and Julian Sands), the subject is original, but the screenplay and, above all, the dialogues are bad. It could be defined as the "classic horror film" with all the components of the case: séance, apparitions, corpses but, unfortunately, with too few "scares". Negligible.