The battle of the sexes and relationships among the elite of Britain’s industrial Midlands in the 1920s. Gerald and Rupert are best friends who fall in love with a pair of sisters Gudrun, a sculptress and Ursula, a schoolteacher. Rupert marries Ursula, Gerald begins a love affair with Gudrun.

Composer, conductor and teacher Peter Ilych Tchaikovsky struggles against his homosexual tendencies by marrying, but unfortunately, he chooses wacky nymphomaniac Nina, whom he is unable to satisfy.

When the leading lady of a traveling theatrical troupe injures herself, the group's shy and demure stage manager, Polly (Twiggy), is suddenly thrust into the spotlight to take her place. As luck would have it, she makes her debut on the same day that famous movie director De Thrill (Vladek Sheybal) attends the performance. Eager to make the jump to motion pictures, all of the actors play to De Thrill, compounding Polly problems. Only the leading man, Tony (Christopher Gable), is sympathetic.

After a series of traumatic childhood events, a psychosomatically deaf, dumb and blind boy becomes a master pinball player and the object of a religious cult.

In the 19th century, Romantic composer/pianist Franz Liszt tries to end his hedonistic ways but keeps getting sucked back in by his seductive fellow composer Richard Wagner.

Respected scientist and psychology professor Edward Jessup (William Hurt) decides to combine his experiments in sensory deprivation tanks with powerful hallucinogenic drugs, convinced that it may help him unlock different states of consciousness. The experiments are a success at first, but as Jessup continues his work, he begins to experience altered mental and also physical states. As he spends more time in sensory deprivation, his grip on reality begins to slip away.

Living on an estate on the shores of Lake Geneva, Lord Byron is visited by Percy and Mary Shelley. Together with Byron's lover Claire Clairmont, and aided by hallucinogenic substances, they devise an evening of ghoulish tales. However, when confronted by horrors, ostensibly of their own creation, it becomes difficult to tell apparition from reality.

On a farm owned by Eve Trent and her sister Mary, young archaeologist Angus Flint discovers a large and inexplicable skull, which he soon deduces belonged to the D'Ampton Worm, a mythical beast supposedly slain generations ago by the ancestor of the current Lord D'Ampton. The predatory Lady Sylvia Marsh soon takes an interest in both Flint and the virginal Eve, hinting that the vicious D'Ampton Worm may still live.