Gothic

Gothic (1987) is a British horror film you can watch online on iFILM — Ken Russell's hallucinatory take on one stormy night at the Villa Diodati in the summer of 1816. Gabriel Byrne plays Lord Byron, Julian Sands is Percy Shelley, and Natasha Richardson makes her film debut as Mary Godwin.

The five of them are sealed in by a thunderstorm. Byron's idea: go around the room and pull out your deepest hidden terror. Opium helps. So does the human skull on the table. What starts as a parlour game stops being a game when the visions stop respecting the borders between imagination and the room they are sitting in. The legend has it that this night pushed Mary toward Frankenstein and Polidori toward the vampire story that eventually fed into Dracula.

Russell shoots none of it as historical drama — the film is all excess, heat and dread, a directed nightmare rather than a period piece. Whether the monsters are real or manufactured is beside the point. Stream Gothic (1987) online on iFILM.