Edvard Munch, Madonna

The wind howls in the bare attic. The floorboards creak. The door opens and shuts, as if moved by an invisible hand. It seems that autumnal nights — when the chilled air creeps insidiously into the room through chinks in the windowpane, winter-bitten strays bawl in the streets and insects circle in dizzy hordes around light bulbs — are particularly suited to the conjuring of cheap thrills. Remove the boring spectacles, and the mangy strays become werewolves baying for blood, the pirouetting insects turn into scarab beetles crawling about in the tomb of the dead, and the room is a graveyard with the furniture as cenotaphs.

This is the season of the shades, of the ghosts of Christmases past, when the spirits of the dead rise, called back by the earth they had left behind. As the departed souls become earthbound, the living spirit too wants to snuggle close to its home in the body, if for nothing but a spot of warmth. The phobic and the erotic are indelibly linked, with one supplementing the other. Death with its accoutrements — the slackened body, the dishevelled hair, the slow oozings — closely resembles the other, less final death, an association underlined by Elizabethans and Jacobeans like Shakespeare and Donne, who habitually used ‘die’ to refer to both sexual climax and the moment of mortality.

In the late 18th century, Ann Radcliffe had set the tone for the Gothic novel with her immensely successful books, which had sent collective shivers down the spine of Romantic England. That shiver always has had a louche quality to it — after all, it always began with the beautiful, distraught girl alone in her bedroom, cowering in the corner, heaving with fright as the unnamed object of terror approaches her, taking the reader along with her in the steady build-up of the tension until she lets out that frenzied scream. Notwithstanding Mrs Radcliffe’s attempt to distinguish between horror and terror by insisting that terror is psychological while horror is physical, horror movies, subtle or gross, by Guillermo del Toro or by the Ramsay Brothers, still follow this pattern with a few variations. And it also explains why horror and pornographic movies go hand in hand, as do Stephenie Meyer and E.L. James. The defenceless female victim may become a whip-wielding heroine in the course of her trials, but that display of female valour has its own kick. The lip-smacking dominatrix is but Count Dracula in fishnet stockings and suspender belts.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) is very much a part of the Gothic tradition, with its atmosphere of foreboding and doom, and with the white menace of the impassable Arctic ice in the opening pages taking the reader back to the cracking and growling icebergs encountered by Coleridge’s guilt-laden Ancient Mariner. Incidentally, it is on a “dreary night” in November, and so, at this time of the dying year, that Victor Frankenstein’s monster first opens its “dull yellow eye”. Before that, Victor had laboured painstakingly in his “workshop of filthy creation” to bring the monster into being, piecing together limbs and skin and guts collected from slaughterhouses and dissecting rooms. The Gothic atmosphere, with its sizzling sexual charge, is very much in place, but here, instead of the customary trembling sexy girl we find a man, a scientist, who, in a further twist, ‘births’ a monster, and then runs away, abandoning the baby to his fate.

What Mary Shelley dissects through Victor are the mysteries of creation, its bloodied spaces where death interlocks with birth. The monster is shaped out of death, not the death of orgasm in Victor’s case, but the ultimate death. Yet the same guilt that had began to dog Eve as soon as she had her fatal bite of the apple of knowledge starts trailing the post-partum Victor too. In his fright and revulsion, he abandons the child of sin, who thereafter must roam the earth like a homeless spirit, psychologically fixed at the moment of his obscene birth, which was also a death.

The earth is preparing for the day of the longest night, the winter solstice. It is the perfect time to remember creatures of dark imaginings, like the Frankenstein monster, embodying our murky fantasies, which also offer us little deaths in each act of love.