History & The Arts
Horror and politics
...painting The Nightmare, with its impish demon squatting on the chest of a sleeping woman, comes to life; as does Percy Bysshe Shelley’s vision of a woman with eyes in place of her nipples. Thus it is that the sexual licence which drove Shelley’s philosophy becomes, in the story world of the film, a source not for legal or moral upheaval, but emotional anarchy....