On a stormy summer night in 1816, poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, his young lover Mary Godwin, and her half-sister Claire Clairmont arrive at the secluded Swiss villa of the notorious Lord Byron and his physician, Dr. John Polidori. Fueled by laudanum, sexual tension, ghost stories, and a fascination with the supernatural, the group challenges one another to create tales of terror.

But as the night descends into hallucination, their darkest desires and private fears begin to take physical form, transforming Byron’s villa into a feverish landscape of nightmares. Ken Russell turns the legendary gathering that inspired Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Polidori’s The Vampyre into a delirious collision of literary history, eroticism, Gothic horror, and psychedelic excess.

“The thinking man’s ‘Nightmare on Elm Street.’” — Daily Variety

“A Ken Russell film, now as before, is like nobody else’s.” — Los Angeles Times