Penny Dreadful Preview

Penny Dreadful is one of the new shows which starts very soon (this coming Monday in fact) and I have had the pleasure of watching an advanced preview of the first episode (which anyone can see online) and I have to say that I was quite surprised with the show and am looking forward to this series more now.

What is Penny Dreadful you ask? Penny Dreadful is Showtimes new gothic horror series which comes from the mind of John Logan who has done the screenplay for many movies over the years most notably Gladiator, Hugo, Skyfall (he actually wrote this one) and most recently worked on Noah. The show itself follows a trio of protagonists who scour the streets of olden day London searching for a missing girl. The show is filled with shadow imagery, gore and dark atmosphere. The streets of midnight London aren't exactly friendly either they are littered with vampires and other beasts that go bump in the night. Take a look at the trailer below and my thoughts on the pilot after the jump.

The show follows different protagonists on their search for the missing girl. The first of the four characters that are introduced in the first episode is Vanessa Ives (played by Eva Green) who is a spiritualist and possibly possessed or haunted by demons as she seems to have some pull over the vampiric monsters that show up in the pilot.

The second character we meet is Ethan Chandler (Josh Hartnedd) who is a a man of action and is introduced to the dark underworld of London when he is hired by Vanessa to help track down the missing girl. Out of the characters that were introduced in the pilot I really enjoyed Ethan's character and it was a shame that he wasn't featured as much in the second half of the pilot.

The third character that is introduced to us in the pilot is Sir Malcolm Murray (Timothy Dalton) who plays a hardened African explorer who is searching for his missing daughter Mina (the one all our protagonists are searching for). We don't see much of Malcolm in the pilot but he is the hardass, do anything to save his daughter kind of guy that is trying to pull any and every string to make sure his daughter returns to him safe and sound.

The whole time I was watching the pilot I was thinking about the League of Extraordinary gentlemen especially with Malcom's character who reminded me of Alan Quatermain. But not only that at the end of the pilot we were also shown Dr. Frankenstein and his monster who just came to life which was done magnificently from the first touch to Frankenstein's monster hearing Dr. Frankensteins voice for the first time. The Frankenstein reveal got me psyched so after the watching the episode I did some digging and found out that the show also has cast a Dorian Gray (Reeve Carney) which got me even more psyched and only time will tell if we get to see anymore iconic characters from Horror mythos.

Overall the show started off strong and could do well to help rejuvenate vampires again (alongside Guiellmo Del Torro's upcoming show the Strain) as the vampires in this show dont try to make out with you or woo you, they will rip your head off the first chance they get. It gives us what we need right off the bat with a novice young hero who has just been introduced to the supernatural side of London and is tacking the mystery along side two veterans and I'm looking forward to see what this show can bring weekly. After the strong start I hope that this show doesn't go downhill cause from the pilot I'm already hooked. Also a big heaps up to Abel Kozeniowsk's atmospheric score for the episode, hope to hear more awesome tracks for this show from Abel.