A Nightmare Wakes
It shouldn’t be so hard to write a good movie about Mary Shelley. The life of the mother of science fiction and horror writing is endlessly fascinating (and tragic), and yet all we’ve gotten is Ken Russell’s deliriously over the top Gothic, and Haifaa al-Mansour’s soap opera romance Mary Shelley. Both movies, despite being wildly different in tone, make the mistake of focusing almost entirely on Shelley’s relationship with Percy Shelley, and their relationship with Lord Byron, who invariably comes off as an oversexed, insufferable dandy. Nora Unkel’s A Nightmare Wakes makes the same mistake, while treating Shelley, a brilliant, innovative writer, as a helpless victim of her own imagination. Continue Reading →