“I have a complicated relationship with the almighty,” she explains, at one point writhing on a table and assuming the hoarse, childlike voice of Malcolm’s late son Peter, who blames his father for his death. She doesn’t just communicate with the dead she gets possessed by them. “Your first born has returned, father,” taunts Caliban, played by a gleeful Rory Kinnear.īut no one does shocks like Vanessa. It’s quite an entrance: the hand belongs to Caliban, Victor’s original “son”, who was disowned in disgust. The two are getting on like a dream – until suddenly, just as they’re sharing a tender moment in the shadowy lab, a hand bursts into Proteus’s chest and rips out his entrails. For the first few episodes, we see Victor mentoring his latest creation, Proteus. There is no shortage of gruesome shocks, either. By the end of the first episode alone, Victor has brought a corpse back to life, Ethan’s had sex with a stranger up against a tree, and Vanessa has prayed before an upside-down cross, causing hundreds of spiders to spill out from beneath it. The show, which aired in the UK on Sky earlier this year, rattles along with breathless night-time hunts in spooky zoos and derelict theatres stuffed with bloodsuckers. When vampires strike, he’s generally to be found poncing around an art gallery. Oscar Wilde’s famously unageing character Dorian Gray pops up too, although he’s more interested in pouting enigmatically and flirting with Vanessa than getting his hands dirty helping the gang out. “I’m engaged in research.” This research seems to take the form of creating “offspring” for himself.įrankenstein is soon brought onboard, though, as is a bit of muscle in the form of American gunslinger Ethan Chandler (Josh Hartnett). “Take it to a slaughterhouse,” he sniffs creepily when the explorer first brings him a dead vampire. Enter Victor Frankenstein who, because of the depraved experiments he’s been carrying out in his lab, has something of a dodgy reputation. Malcolm needs a doctor as well, to examine all these odd bodies with sharp fangs he keeps finding. The only snag? Vanessa and Mina aren’t best buddies any more, not since Vanessa seduced Mina’s fiance out of spite. He needs her childhood friend Vanessa Ives, a medium played with monstrous cool by Eva Green, to help him find her. Timothy Dalton, sporting a distinctive grey beard, plays the renowned explorer Malcolm Murray who – many years ago and in largely unexplained circumstances – lost his daughter to a vampire known as The Master. Logan’s show is no less trashy: this is goth-schlock of the highest order. At the time, real penny dreadfuls (cheap, lurid books aimed at young men) caused outrage and moral panic with their torrid tales of debauchery and death. Created by John Logan, the man who penned the Bond film Skyfall, Penny Dreadful reimagines the late 19th century as a sleazy hotbed of supernatural activity, inhabited by hedonists, swines, ghosts, ghoulies – and fictional horror characters come to life. I t’s Victorian life, but not as we know it.
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