Television series

Penny Dreadful

Name: Penny Dreadful
Genre: Horror, Thriller, Supernatural
Released: 2014
Cast: Timothy Dalton, Eva Green, Harry Treadaway, Josh Hartnett, Rory Kinnear

Penny Dreadful throws Dracula's world, Dorian Gray, and Frankenstein's creature into the same fog-choked Victorian London, then lets Eva Green's séance-scarred medium anchor them all. It's less monster mash than mood piece — gorgeous, mournful, obsessed with shame and desire. Slow-burn horror for people who want atmosphere and melodrama over jump scares, with a cast clearly relishing every velvet-draped, blood-soaked line.

TVMaze rating

4.1

Should you watch it?

Watch it if you want gothic dread stitched from Victorian literature, where familiar monsters are treated as tragic people and the slow-burning dread of a mystery matters more than jump scares.

Skip it if the pace is deliberately unhurried and graphic violence runs hard, so if you want tidy episodic scares or quick payoffs, it will test your patience.

What it asks of you: Three seasons and twenty-seven hour-long episodes ask for a long, committed stretch of brooding talk between shocks, where atmosphere builds across the run rather than minutes.

Not sure? Find tonight's pick in a minute.

If you liked this

Hannibal2013

Bryan Fuller's fever-dream take on Thomas Harris trades gore for painterly dread and a doomed, magnetic bond between hunter and monster — the same slow, gorgeous horror-as-seduction Penny Dreadful trades in.

But It's even slower and more abstract, more interested in dream logic than plot, and the violence, when it comes, is genuinely upsetting.

Crimson Peak2015

Guillermo del Toro's haunted-house romance shares Penny Dreadful's velvet-and-blood aesthetic — gothic mansions, repressed desire, ghosts as grief made visible, filmed like a painting come alive.

But It's a two-hour film, not a series, so you lose the slow accumulation of dread the show does so well.

Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire2022

As lush, queer, and unashamedly melodramatic as Penny Dreadful, treating vampirism as a metaphor for shame and appetite rather than just fangs and capes.

But It leans harder into camp and soap-opera excess; if you wanted the show's mournful restraint, this can feel louder.

Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire poster

Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from Penny Dreadful

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

House of Frankenstein1944

Same founding idea — put the classic literary monsters in one shared story — executed decades earlier, stripped to pure spectacle instead of trauma and metaphor.

This is the blueprint — Universal crammed Dracula, Frankenstein's monster, and a wolf man into one house eighty years before Penny Dreadful, proving the mash-up urge is as old as the monsters themselves.

But It's a brisk 71 minutes of black-and-white B-movie pulp with none of the psychological weight — creaky fun, not prestige drama.

The Alienist2018

Swap London fog for New York gaslight and you get the same period psychological darkness — a killer hunt steeped in Victorian repression and class rot.

But It's a straighter crime procedural underneath the gothic dressing, with none of the actual supernatural creatures you came for.

Taboo2017

Tom Hardy broods through grimy Georgian London carrying trauma, secrets, and a vendetta, in the same murky, tactile, morally filthy register as Penny Dreadful's Ethan Chandler.

But It's thinner on supernatural horror and heavier on colonial intrigue and revenge plotting — a different genre wearing a similar costume.

American Horror Story2011

The same pulpy, unapologetic horror-melodrama energy — big performances, gothic imagery, queasy sexuality — but pitched even trashier and split into anthology-sized bites.

But The tone swings wildly season to season, and its camp excess can feel cheap next to Penny Dreadful's more controlled dread.

Bram Stoker's Dracula1992

Coppola's fevered, operatic Dracula is the source material Penny Dreadful is riffing on — decadent, erotic, visually overstuffed gothic horror from the genre's most literal starting point.

But The performances are a choice, particularly Keanu Reeves's accent, and the melodrama tips into unintentional comedy at times.

Sleepy Hollow2013

A lighter, pulpier cousin — literary horror figures colliding with a modern mystery plot, monster-of-the-week energy, and a central duo with real chemistry.

But It's considerably campier and less interested in psychological depth; the later seasons lose the plot almost literally.

The Terror2018

Trade London streets for Arctic ice — the same slow-building, character-driven dread, the same sense that the real horror is what people do to each other under pressure.

But There's no gothic glamour here, no monsters in top hats — just cold, bleak survival horror with a much grimmer palette.

Castlevania2017

Both take Dracula seriously as a tragic, almost sympathetic monster rather than a cackling villain — the same emotional register poured into a wholly different medium and genre.

Same Dracula mythology, same gothic melodrama and blood-soaked tragedy, but rendered as gorgeous, R-rated animation with brutal action set-pieces instead of Victorian drawing rooms.

But It's animated and genre-shifted toward action-fantasy; if you came for slow psychological dread, this trades it for sword fights and body horror.

Nosferatu the Vampyre1979

Both mine vampire mythology for genuine sorrow and existential horror rather than thrills, but Herzog strips out every ounce of camp and glamour Penny Dreadful revels in.

Klaus Kinski's Dracula isn't seductive — he's a plague, exhausted and grotesque, filmed by Herzog with the same existential dread he brought to his jungle epics. Horror as quiet, devastating art film.

But It's meditative, occasionally subtitled, and almost entirely without the melodrama, humour, or momentum Penny Dreadful runs on.