Creation Myth: The Imagining of the Gothic Imagination in the Diodati Triptych: Gothic (1986), Haunted Summer (1988), and Remando al viento (1988)

Abstract

This article argues that amid the slasher carnage, three 1980s gothic films representing the literary imagination of Frankenstein attempted to proffer a vision of horror rooted in creation rather than death. In so doing they reinvigorate the radical roots of horror as a challenge to the status quo: a reconfiguration of life into forms which awaken fears as characters face precarious destinies haunted by their past. Ken Russell’s Gothic (1986), Ivan Passer’s Haunted Summer (1988), and Gonzalo Suárez’s Remando al viento / Rowing with the Wind (1988) all depict Mary Shelley facing personal and social challenges from her (male) peers including Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Polidori. Arguably it is Mary who will in time emerge as an even more enduring literary voice, evinced by the fact of her being the protagonist of these films. During the Summer at Villa Diodati on the shores of Lake Geneva where each of these authors sought to create stories of horror, the films imagine the psychosexual power games and intellectual debates which surrounded these literary conjurations. All three films also depict an intrusion of the supernatural as Mary’s monster actually manifests in the liminal space between waking and dreaming. Though wildly different in tone and affect, all three films represent a Gothicism (or an adjacent Gothic allusion) distinct from either the nostalgic or the dismissive deployment of its tropes in other genre films at the time and in so doing raise questions about 1980s cinema and culture more broadly.