Halloween is only two weeks away, and I’ll be the first to admit that for some reason or another I’m just not as in the spirit of the season the way I usually am. Maybe it’s because Sarah and I haven’t been planning our costumes since July (which is usually the case) because we’re planning for a wedding. Or maybe it’s because Halloween is basically a massive drunken party holiday and as I get older I find that less and less appealing?
I’m just kidding, I totally will get drunk and party, even if that means getting drunk and partying by myself watching horror movies. Or, horror TV shows.
There haven’t been a ton of horror television shows that I can think of before 4 or 5 years ago. Sure, shows like X-Files and Outer Limits often had horror elements, but most of them were also pretty deeply science fiction influenced too. And there was Buffy and Angel, but they were more like “horror adventure” with very little actually creepy or scary going on. But now, there’s more and more horror coming to us in episodic format. I think that’s a good thing. Since I love horror. So this week and probably next week we’ll be talking about a few shows that have actually nailed (in different ways) it when it comes to bringing horror to the small screen. We’re going to start it off with two shows that, depending on what streaming services you’ve got you can totally binge right now between now and Halloween, Penny Dreadful and Scream. Scream is available right now on Netflix and the first season of Penny Dreadful is on Crave TV.
Penny Dreadful
So here’s a fun little story. Listeners to 9to5 Entertainment System will know that I played me some tabletop and live action role playing games in my time. Specifically, I spent quite time playing in a Vampire role playing game set in Victorian England. I played a foppish Toreador who was really into throwing lavish house parties. If you don’t know what a Toreador vampire is you should probably look it up. You might think less of me if you do. Don’t you judge me.
Anyways. long story short I think that Victorian era horror is amazing. Penny Dreadful does a similar thing that League of Extraordinary Gentlemen does which is to re-purpose classic literary figures for new, untold stories. It might seem like a tough sell that Dorian Grey, Victor Frakenstein, Mina Harker and vampires, pyschics and werewolves are all running around at the same time, but it pulls it off. I pretty much gave up True Blood because it became a jumbled mess. Penny Dreadful on the other hand (at least, in the first season) doesn’t get bogged down at any given point.
It does this by sticking to a core story of Malcolm Murray (played by Timothy Dalton) obsessing over tracking down his missing daughter who was abducted by a vampire. To do this he enlists psychic Vanessa Ives (who he’s known since she was a wee girl), an American sharpshooter (played by Josh Hartnett) and Doctor Frankenstein. By not wavering too much from the core story-line it weaves a pretty coherent through line across all 8 episodes. It is much more plot driven than something like American Horror Story but also leaves a lot of room for character development. ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
