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Percy Bysshe Shelley Movies & TV

The Romantics (2006)

This British TV miniseries looks at the lives of the Romantic writers, a group that includes Shelley and his wife along with such literary luminaries as Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth.

Bride of Frankenstein (1935)

The 1931 film version of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was so successful that the studio made a sequel four years later called The Bride of Frankenstein. The movie begins with a bizarre prologue in which Lord Byron attempts to seduce Mary Shelley as Percy Shelley looks on haplessly. Then it gets into the monsters.

Gothic (1986)

A freaky movie that imagines what it was like at the house in Lake Geneva where the Shelleys summered with Lord Byron in 1816. If this film is to be believed, Shelley spent most of the time in a drug-like trance while Lord Byron skulked about acting creepy as hell. Very disturbing - but then again, we weren't there and can't say for sure it wasn't like this.

Haunted Summer (1988)

A slightly less creepy movie about that same summer of 1816. Though we don't know for sure how the summer went down, it's possible that a house full of attractive young practitioners of free love did get a little weird at times. All we know is that by the end of the summer, residents of the house had created both Frankenstein and the basic plot of every vampire movie written since.

Byron (2003)

Few lives were as drama-filled as that of George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron, also known as Lord Byron. He became deeply entangled in the Shelleys' lives, trading poetic rivalries with Percy Bysshe Shelley and impregnating Mary's half-sister. This made for television biopic sums up the sexual escapades, literary triumphs and shady dealings of this curious creature.

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994)

Kenneth Branaugh directed this film adaptation of the book, and even credits Mary Shelley as a screenwriter. It is the latest in a line of hundreds of Frankenstein films made since the first in 1910. Robert de Niro plays the monster, though he's still not as scary as he was in Taxi Driver.