Surely I write not for the hopeful young,
Or those who deem their happiness of worth,
Or such as pasture and grow fat among
The shows of life and feel nor doubt nor dearth,
Or pious spirits with a God above them
To sanctify and glorify and love them,
Or sages who foresee a heaven on earth.

James Thomson, 1882

The City Of Dreadful Night gets its title from a poem written almost two centuries after our story takes place. Parts of it are based on true facts. Save for Sebastiaan (who, it could be argued, remains the protagonist), all of its characters are inspired by historical figures who may or may not have interacted in the way the screenplay suggests. It is set in 18th Century Amsterdam, which used to exist as well. The rest is invented, but we usually advise the readers to pretend it isn't.

Unlike Gunther Von Hagens, whose Body Worlds exhibition has recently received both disproportionate praise and derision, Frederik Ruysch was a genuine artist. His preparations were so beautiful that we chose not to include degraded pictures of them on this site.

Art and science weren't such separate disciplines back then, but they were beginning to dissociate, the same way Body and Soul had been popularly isolated by Descartes. Ruysch suffered for it, more explicitly than we do today. In keeping with Mr. Raft's Slow Whoop philosophy, The City Of Dreadful Night hopes to bridge these gaps as much as to present itself as a valid interlocutor to Ruysch's concerns. It's fun to read as well.

Catherina Schrader was probably not the first midwife to keep a diary, but the amount of detail in her surviving documents would have allowed me to base an entire movie on them. Next time.

Peter The Great had to be toned down. Too mean to be plausible.

With Rachel Ruysch I took some liberties.

"The errata to non-fiction, that's who we are."

William Raft. SW founding member, 1923