There have also been cases where the image was mobilised in art-historically informed ways, as with Éric Rohmer’s The Marquise of O (1976), or most obviously Ken Russell’s Gothic (1986). In the field of the moving image, Fuseli’s composition has been utilised numerous times, surely informing the visualisation of vampiric malevolence from Nosferatu (1922) through to “Hammer Horror” and beyond, and serving as the model for a multitude of posters and DVD covers. Viewers at the time speculated as to what the painting meant: was this something from a known literary source or just the sick outpouring of a deranged imagination? Art historians and critics have since the mid-twentieth century explored the picture more deeply, referring to interpretive keys from the artist’s sexual desires and experience of unrequited love, to the monstrous and phallic imagery contained with the painting – which makes it a gift to Freudian analysis – and fairy-tale traditions and the possibility of scientific allusions (either in reference to then-current understandings of sleep paralysis, or the effects of narcotics, stimulants, and diet), as well as to sources in Shakespeare, folklore and antique texts, or images by Salvator Rosa, Guido Reni, and elsewhere within classical sculpture… the list goes on. Instead, it was a dazzling conundrum, combining an array of folkloric, classical, art-historical, and poetic allusions that no one then, or since, has been able to decode satisfactorily. The exhibition of The Nightmare in 1782 was a new departure for Fuseli: relatively small scale, the painting lacked definite literary or mythological source matter.

Gothic Nightmares by Martin Myrone