![]() ![]() Stuffed animals, corpses, and run-down buildings fill the backgrounds and often the foregrounds of the show, with the living, breathing protagonists are the oddity, not the norm. More than anything, Penny Dreadful is a mediation on the naturalness of death. Unlike the publications it’s named for, the show focuses not on the lurid but on existential ideas and atmosphere. Instead of trying to change or downplay the tone or signal self-awareness about it, Penny Dreadful gives the audience actual dark and stormy nights, and makes them actually scary and foreboding. That story works because the show embraces its genre unapologetically. The Dracula plot is still the anchor-and still closer to Bram Stoker's novel than NBC's recent, campy miniseries-but the overall story is quite new, and weaved together in such a way that even moments from the books surprise. But then it throws in the experiments of Victor Frankenstein (Harry Treadaway), a manipulative demon, the Grand Guignol theater, and a heavy dose of Egyptian mythology. The show's main plot is quite simple: Obliquely it's a Dracula adaptation, with psychic Vanessa Ives (Eva Green) and Sir Malcolm Murray (Timothy Dalton) recruiting a band of literary archetypes to rescue Malcolm's daughter Mina from vampires. ![]() But Penny Dreadful assembles its cast of literary characters and icons to stage an entirely straight-faced horror show. The Van Helsing movie mixed genre homage with an action film and disappointed in both efforts. However, that series quickly turned into an exercise of deconstruction, while the film adaptation went for un-nuanced camp. At the turn of the recent century, Alan Moore brought Victorian heroes together in his comic The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. The monster mash goes back to the Universal Monster movies starting in the ‘20s. Throwing a bunch of literary characters together in a story isn't new. ![]() John Logan, who created and wrote the entire show, strings together Dracula, Frankenstein, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and elements from other works into one shared narrative. Penny Dreadful takes its name from the cheap sensationalist fiction of 1800s Britain, but its characters and story owes more to the great gothic literature of the Victorian era. If the literature were a song, Penny Dreadful is an addictive remix instead of a cover that loses the potency and point. It's scary, and it has managed to put a new spin on classic horror tales without betraying them. That's what makes Showtime’s Penny Dreadful, whose first season finale airs Sunday, such a delight. But good, rich, gothic horror, where the frights elevate the drama and vice versa, is rare. The horror market remains strong, producing plenty films with jump-scares and gore. ![]()
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