Frankenstein and the Vampyre: A Dark and Stormy Night

Blackleaf

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In 1816, a group of young English writers - Percy Shelley, Mary Godwin (who would soon become Mary Shelley upon her marriage to Percy), Lord Byron and John William Polidori - met at a villa on the shores of Lake Geneva, spending their time writing, boating on the lake and talking late into the night.

It may have been summer, but the days and nights were often racked with terrible weather and violent thunderstorms. The Earth's climate was suffering as a result of the 1815 Tambora eruption, and the group of friends would stay up late into the night as a thunderstorm raged outside terrifying each other with ghost stories.

This now historic meeting would result in the birth of one of history's most famous monsters - Frankenstein's monster - and when the modern vampire tale was born.



A fascinating exploration of one of the most significant moments in gothic history - the night when Mary Shelley, Lord Byron and their cohorts gathered together in Lake Geneva to tell ghost stories. The night when Frankenstein and the modern vampire were born. All those involved in the events of the summer of 1816 wrote about their life-changing stay in Switzerland. This dramatised documentary is based on their letters, journals and diaries. The film also draws on British Library manuscripts and archive, and brings together a stellar cast of gothic, horror and science fiction writers, including Neil Gaiman, Charlaine Harris and Margaret Atwood, to discuss why one single night had such a significant impact on our culture.

Watch it here: BBC iPlayer - Frankenstein and the Vampyre: A Dark and Stormy Night




"I beheld the wretch — the miserable monster whom I had created. He held up the curtain of the bed; and his eyes, if eyes they may be called, were fixed on me. His jaws opened, and he muttered some inarticulate sounds, while a grin wrinkled his cheeks. He might have spoken, but I did not hear; one hand was stretched out, seemingly to detain me, but I escaped and rushed downstairs. I took refuge in the courtyard belonging to the house which I inhabited, where I remained during the rest of the night, walking up and down in the greatest agitation, listening attentively, catching and fearing each sound as if it were to announce the approach of the demoniacal corpse to which I had so miserably given life."


Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus (1818 )
 

Blackleaf

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She was only about 21 when Frankenstein was published in 1818.

She's also about the only one of the group who didn't die young in tragic circumstances. Most of them would be dead just a few years after that famous meeting in 1816. It was as though they were cursed.

Polidori committed suicide by taking cyanide in London on 24th August 1821, weighed down by depression and gambling debts, just short of his 26th birthday. Percy Shelley drowned in his sailing boat in the Gulf of Spezia off north west Italy in July 1822, just a month before his 30th birthday. Byron died aged 36 from sepsis in 1824 just before his planned attack of the Turks whilst fighting for the Greeks in their War of Independence.

Mary Shelley, however, went on to have a successful writing career. She wrote the novels Perkin Warbeck (1830), Lodore (1835), and Falkner (1837). She contributed five volumes of Lives of Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and French authors to Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopaedia. She also wrote stories for ladies' magazines (her mother was the famous feminist Mary Wollstonecraft). She died on 1st February 1851 aged 53.

Spine-chillers and suspense: A timeline of Gothic fiction



BBC - iWonder - Spine-chillers and suspense: A timeline of Gothic fiction
 
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EagleSmack

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A fascinating exploration of one of the most significant moments in gothic history - the night when Mary Shelley, Lord Byron

I actually watched this movie on a evening while I had the flu and a raging fever.

What a trip!