Black- and blue-tinged images unfurl to the low bass of a violin. A rosary. Drops of blood. Tarot cards. A scorpion curling its tail. A scalpel slicing into a cadaver. An insect flailing against a spider’s web. Showtime’s new series “Penny Dreadful” — which I look at today on Word and Film — instantly hits viewers with classic horror iconography, both to establish a mood and to honor the literary sources that serve as its inspiration. Set in 1891, the series takes its name from the serialized and printed tales popularized in nineteenth-century England, mixing elements from Gothic and Victorian literature into what’s been called a “clever pastiche.” It airs Sunday nights, and you can catch the pilot on YouTube.
The central narrative follows African explorer Sir Malcolm Murray (Timothy Dalton), spiritualist Vanessa Ives (Eva Green), and American gunslinger Ethan Chandler (Josh Hartnett) in a search for Murray’s missing daughter, Mina. Mina was engaged to a Jonathan Harker before she fell prey to a sinister creature, Vanessa explains — but this is no retelling of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Rather, the trio run across other public-domain characters, such as Dr. Victor Frankenstein (Harry Treadaway) and the ageless Dorian Gray (Reeve Carney), as they investigate the supernatural realm.
Series creator and executive producer John Logan has said his idea took shape after he read Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, and Stoker’s 1897 classic in close succession. He soon realized that other horror touchstones — such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, H.G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau, and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray — were written within a decade of Dracula. There had to be something in the water back then, some societal influence, Logan muses on the series’ video production blog.
“Horror is about trying to codify anxiety. Trying to name and understand the things we fear. At the onset of the modern age, these writers were able to transmutate that anxiety that Londoners felt about science, about evolution,” Logan says on the blog. “They cut so deep into what it is to be alive, to be unhappy, to want.”