With all the hype (justified) around Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein, I’ve just finished listening to The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole (1764), recording/narration by Thomas A. Copeland, the novel that spawned the Gothic by dropping a giant helmet on a sickly bridegroom and killing him stone-dead on the day of his wedding. (Click the title above for the Project Gutenberg eBook).

If you’re curious about ‘the first Gothic novel’, here are some fun starters for you to check out:

Articles

The Castle of Otranto, Wikipedia
The Castle of Otranto: The creepy tale that launched Gothic fiction, BBC Magazine, 2014
The Castle of Otranto, Encyclopaedia Britannica
Backlash: Romantic Reactions to The Castle of Otranto and England’s Gothic Craze, Andrew Reszitnyk, 2012
Classics: The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole, The Gothic Library, 2018
Review: The Castle of Otranto, The Grub Street Lodger, 2022

VideosIntroduction to the BookGothic Introductions by Dr Sam Hirst – The Castle of Otranto (5mins 57secs)Introduction to the AuthorLGBT History Month (UK): Horace Walpole by Dale Townshend, Manchester Metropolitan University (3mins 41secs)Introduction to Walpole’s Gothic House as InspirationStrawberry Hill: The Gothic Masterpiece that Haunted 18thC Europe | BBC Timestamp (5mins 38secs)

The Gothic has always been queer and transgressive, even from its inception (where incestuous/inappropriate m/f relationships are a possible stand-in for repressed homosexual desires), but this particular novel has not had the same kind of adaptation treatment as its more famous successors. That is, frankly, because it’s bananas.

There is one adaptation:

 Otrantský zámek / The Castle of Otranto dir. Jan Švankmajer (1977) – an 18min animated Czech short based on Walpole’s novel. Švankmajer’s pseudo-documentary follows an amateur archaeologist and his exploration of the setting of Otranto Castle, which he believes is in Czechoslovakia, not Italy. (Watch on DailyMotion, also available on BFI Player). Book Plot

Let’s break this down. Spoilers ahoy.

Here’s a handy Character List.

The whole thing is that the giant ghost of Alphonso is haunting the castle to fulfil a prophecy, that the Castle of Otranto will pass from the present family when the real owner (Alphonso’s ghost) grows too large to inhabit it. He takes the form of a gigantic, armoured knight, but the characters only see bits of him at any one time until the big climax.

The first glimpse we get of this is his helmet, crashing down from the sky without an explanation or any warning, and landing on the only heir to the castle (Conrad), as he crosses the courtyard on the way to his own wedding.

Later, servants are terrified at the sight of a giant leg in the gallery, and an arm somewhere else.

A group of mysterious knights rock up with a giant sabre they found in Joppa while on the Crusades, guided to it by a hermit who shows up later as a skeleton, and reunite the sabre with the helmet and Alphonso’s gigantic armoured ghost then puts in a brief appearance.

The plot, such as there is, revolves around the prophecy and the doomed family: Manfred is the current Prince of Otranto, and he’s a dickhead. He has one son, Conrad, who gets squashed like a bug in Chapter One, and a daughter Matilda who is the clever one he totally ignores. His pious wife Hippolita exists to pray and serve his whims, even when that extends to annulling their marriage on dubious grounds.

Matilda has a maid called Bianca, who is the sassy but loyal one who enjoys gossip and drama.

Conrad‘s bride is Isabella, Manfred’s ward, whose father, Frederic, is believed dead while on Crusade.

Well, Conrad’s squished, so Manfred has an absolute meltdown, as there goes his only son and heir. If Matilda marries, then Otranto will pass from his family line to her husband’s, and he can’t be having that for Ego Reasons. So he does the only sane thing a man can do in that position: proposes to Isabella, who is his daughter’s age, and tries to annul his own marriage so he can marry her legally and get some more sons.

Also, he wants to know what the hell just happened, and in the confusion he arrests a (suspiciously well-spoken) peasant, Theodore, whom he mistakenly believes is somehow responsible for the helmet catastrophe. He imprisons Theodore under the helmet. It doesn’t help that Theodore strongly resembles Alphonso, the ancestral owner of the castle… Hmmm I wonder what that secret could be that we’re probably going to find out later…

Isabella, horrified by her father-in-law’s proposal, runs away. The ghost of Manfred’s grandad comes out of a painting and scares a few people witless. Theodore manages to escape the helmet and meets Isabella, and helps her to escape. He then decides not to impugn her honour by escaping too, in case people think she has escaped with him, and so he … goes back under the helmet.

There is some shenanigans where Matilda fancies him too, and a bit of a love triangle but where each lady tries to out-pious the other by sacrificing her happiness for the other’s happiness, and tries to yield their claims to him. It turns out he’s into Matilda.

More shenanigans ensue with the action happening off stage, like a Greek drama, with Manfred being alerted to a giant ghost by servants rushing in and not being able to give him accurate information, very much in a comedy of miscommunication sketch style. (These scenes would work really well on stage).

Anyway, Isabella goes and hides out in a monastery with Fr. Jerome. Jerome is actually Theodore’s dad, in his Before the Monastery days, and they are both (surprise!) nobility. Theodore actually has a claim to Otranto. That’s why he talks like a nobleman and looks exactly like the late Alphonso. He is the rightful heir! What a surprising twist.

Theodore escapes Manfred’s wrath and again finds Isabella hiding out in tunnels and trying to escape Manfred.

Meanwhile, visitors to the castle have brought a giant sabre to the door, and their leader is a mysterious knight (about Manfred’s age). The sabre was shown to them by a wise old holy hermit near Joppa, and they’ve brought it to Otranto for Prophecy Reasons.

The mystery leader goes in search of the missing Isabella and finds Theodore protecting her. Theodore thinks the Mystery Man has been sent by Manfred and they duel. Theodore wounds Mystery Man, and it turns out… he’s just stabbed Isabella’s missing dad, Frederic. Oops.

Fortunately, it’s not fatal, there’s a touching reunion, and Isabella accompanies her wounded father and Theodore back to Otranto. Manfred again tries to execute Theodore even though it’s obvious by now he has nothing to do with the whole ghost giant thing, and Fr. Jerome confesses that Theodore is his son. There’s more shenanigans, and Manfred eventually relents.

Manfred now proposes to Frederic that if Frederic will let Manfred marry Isabella, Frederic can marry Matilda.

Matilda, who is in love with Theodore, who has spent all his time “saving” Isabella (badly), is not pleased at the thought of marrying Isabella’s dad.

Hippolita piously prepares for divorce and is no use whatsoever.

Frederic gets a visit from the holy old hermit who showed him where the giant sabre was, but the old monk is now a skeleton who terrifies him, and warns him against marrying Matilda.

Matilda goes to be with Theodore, but Manfred is insanely jealous and believes Theodore and Isabella are an item. He catches them together, believes it’s Isabella, and runs her through in a rage. It turns out he’s just killed his own daughter.

Matilda dies peacefully and piously, with much forgiveness and weeping all around.

At some point – GIANT GHOST appears.

Theodore marries Isabella instead, but basically vows to spend the rest of his life mourning for his lost love, Matilda. He ends up with the castle, and everyone lives miserably ever after.

Feature Film Adaptation

If you’re thinking, that would be a cool plot without the weird supernatural fever dream nonsense, you could read Clara Reeve’s retelling/adaptation/loosely based novel, The Old English Baron (1778), edited by Mrs Bridgen (daughter of the author and painter, Samuel Richardson). This novel was another major player in the development of Gothic fiction, and can be read online.

However, I would personally love to see something wilder and more contemporary.

Hear me out:

Modern-day religious cult family terrified of a ghostly giant prophecy. They’re very rich so we’re sticking with the names as not out of place. I’m leaning to super-rich US Americans, actually, as there’s that very culturally specific brand of US entitlement to European spaces when they can claim a bit of heritage in that place, without much understanding of what that actually means, or any grasp of the cultural norms and laws and so on. (No, not all US Americans… but definitely some of them).

The setting is a castle that Manfred has bought which has a caveat that it’s only his if he has got signed permission from the true heir, but the heir cannot be found. Manfred has been Doing Genealogy and believes this is his birthright, although prior to this he’s never been out of his state before. He has become rabid and weird about this, and has made it his whole identity and personality. He’s now hosting his son’s wedding there.

I think what would be a really fun device here is that, just like the novel claimed to be a ‘found manuscript’, this is ‘found footage’, but you get a mix of ‘footage’ (what is real and filmed), and character POV film, so you can see what they are seeing/think they see.

People find the footage in real time but it cuts out at inopportune moments or gets obscured, so it’s easy to get the wrong end of the stick from watching/listening to things back, and that propels the miscommunication and assumptions.

Manfred is the patriarch, but slimy and Mr Collins-like (thanks for that visual, Sam Hirst).
Hippolita is the perfect trad wife, but has no personality of her own outside of Bible Study and baking.
Matilda is the dutiful daughter who runs Hippolita’s trad wife social media.
Bianca is the sassy influencer hired for the wedding, who ends up feeling sorry for Matilda even as she sucks up to her for exposure and collabs.
Isabella was taken in by the family after her dad went missing on a mission trip. She’s being married off to Conrad, the weedy son, and is pretty miserable about it.

At this point, I reckon that the whole wedding party is spiked with hallucinogens or exposed to something in the ‘fairytale castle’ where the wedding is due to take place.

Time warps – the whole novel only takes a few days, a lot of Plot is tightly packed into a short space of time, so I think all the supernatural stuff could be explained either a bad trip, or as something they’re actually opening themselves to seeing.

Conrad could have been crushed by falling masonry (the castle is unsafe). But because of the prophecy, everyone sees it as a helmet – the power of mass suggestion, or actually a giant helmet?

We aren’t sure, because we see Groom Cam footage of Conrad (everyone’s wearing a camera for the wedding video compilation) getting crushed to death, but we’re not sure what by. Then someone screams that it’s a giant helmet, and all hell breaks loose.

You can then have reels and TikToks from Matilda and Bianca, with the scripted Lives vs the reality off-screen contrasted as things get increasingly weirder and weirder. As most of the action happens off screen in the book, you can have that happening here too, as people start tripping out and getting increasingly erratic and unreliable. The Guest Cam/Bride Cam/Social Media footage is only marginally helpful, as it doesn’t fully reveal things, only provide more questions and muddy the already muddied waters.

The group of armed knights who come with the giant sabre could be a gang who steal and smuggle antiquities out of different countries, perhaps the way the religious group/cult is funded, with Frederic as the mystery leader. He’s looking for his daughter Isabella, of course.

(I also think this works with the whole grooming theme, and older men marrying much younger wives, and the idea of Isabella’s dad agreeing to her marriage to Manfred as long as he gets to have Matilda.)

The sabre itself is an antiquity belonging to the castle, and is indeed brought back by Isabella’s missing father, but as they come under the strange influence of whatever it is going on there, they also start buying into the hysteria of ghosts and giants, and start seeing the sabre as enormous, and their stories of how they found it get as warped as the rest of the narrative.

Theodore is a local lad that Manfred wants to get rid of, because it’s fairly obvious he is the true heir. It does turn out he’s the son of the local priest, Jerome, who is there by law or something, to be present at the wedding.

(A little twist might be that Jerome is responsible for the hallucinations, to ruin the wedding and try to stall it so that Theodore can take his place as the rightful heir, but he didn’t realise how out of control things would get as a result. In the book, he obfuscates and tries to conceal things from Manfred, and this also has unintended negative consequences, so I think that fits. It would mean that he had a grand plan in advance, and it all falls to bits).

Bianca is the only one with any sense, and it’s not clear (either from her footage or her ‘off camera’ scenes) whether she is under the influence of anything, or if she’s worked out what’s happening and is stirring the paranormal paranoia.

However… obviously this goes very wrong, and ends up with a jealous Manfred stabbing his own daughter in a case of mistaken identity, and Matilda’s death.

I think this could work, and be really weird and messed up, as well as quite funny in places.

I want Samara Weaving and Mia Goth in this.

Directed by Ben Wheatley [A Field in England (2013), Meg 2: The Trench (2023)] because that man has range.

OR

Directed by Angela Bassett (I loved her series of American Horror Story which has a very similar device of found footage vs viewing outside that device).

OR

Directed by an indie Italian director who maybe wants to say something about the selling off of Italian land and homes to foreigners, and have the whole film be about the underlying issues with that (focused around Theodore’s rightful inheritance).

I don’t know!

Anyway, that’s my adaptation idea… someone who knows how to do screenwriting should get on that, I reckon.