Drug-fueled dreams at Diodati produced the founding texts of Gothic horror

Evidence

Masterpieces of horror were also influenced by drug use. Mary Shelley’s masterpiece of horror, Frankenstein, written when she was just 19, may have been fueled by an opium trip. As dramatized in Ken Russell’s 1986 film Gothic, Shelley and a group of her friends spend a strange night at Diodati on the shore of Lake Geneva, in which drug consumption and the reading of horror tales inspired not only Frankenstein, but also Dr. Polidori’s story The Vampyre, which served as an inspiration for Bram Stoker’s Dracula. … On the night of June 16 , the Shelley party dined at Diodati and was caught in a torrential downpour; they spent most of the night around the fireplace reading aloud a book of German horror stories. This inspired Byron to propose they each write a similar ghost story. On the night of June 21, Mary had a “waking dream,” or nightmare, that fueled her vivid imagination and created the core plot for her classic novel, Frankenstein. Dr. Polidori, who later committed suicide, submitted The Vampyre, reported to be the inspiration for Bram Stoker’s Dracula. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 459

Categorization

• CANDY: The Diodati night that produced Frankenstein, The Vampyre, and ultimately Dracula all from one stormy evening of German horror stories is a great dinner-party story.