During the fated summer of 1816 when the young Mary Shelley first dreamt up Frankenstein, her soon-to-be husband Percy Bysshe Shelley got freaked out by a ghost story. Exchanging poems and tales with the poet Lord Byron, one evening Shelley rushed from the room of their lakeside villa in Geneva. The source of his disquiet? A sudden vision of a woman with eyes on her breasts where there should be nipples.  

You’d think that some similarly shocking vision had been unleashed last week, given the amount of commentary generated by Florence Pugh’s nipples. What did they do to incur such furore? Were they, too, replaced with some other far more disturbing body part, presenting their own moment of Gothic shock? Sadly, the truth is far more mundane. All the actor had to do to experience men rushing around in horror was make hers vaguely visible.