Penny Dreadful box set review – a Victorian horror show that takes the macabre to new heights (or depths)

It’s Victorian life, but not as we know it. Not by a long chalk, actually. 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. 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. Logan’s show is no less trashy: this is goth-schlock of the highest order.

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. He needs her childhood friend Vanessa Ives, a medium played with monstrous cool by Eva Green, to help him find her. The only snag? Vanessa and Mina aren’t best buddies any more, not since Vanessa seduced Mina’s fiance out of spite.

Malcolm needs a doctor as well, to examine all these odd bodies with sharp fangs he keeps finding. Enter Victor Frankenstein who, because of the depraved experiments he’s been carrying out in his lab, has something of a dodgy reputation. “Take it to a slaughterhouse,” he sniffs creepily when the explorer first brings him a dead vampire. “I’m engaged in research.” This research seems to take the form of creating “offspring” for himself.

Frankenstein is soon brought onboard, though, as is a bit of muscle in the form of American gunslinger Ethan Chandler (Josh Hartnett). 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. When vampires strike, he’s generally to be found poncing around an art gallery.

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. 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.

There is no shortage of gruesome shocks, either. For the first few episodes, we see Victor mentoring his latest creation, Proteus. 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. It’s quite an entrance: the hand belongs to Caliban, Victor’s original “son”, who was disowned in disgust. “Your first born has returned, father,” taunts Caliban, played by a gleeful Rory Kinnear.

But no one does shocks like Vanessa. She doesn’t just communicate with the dead; she gets possessed by them. “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. By episode seven, she’s attacking her own friends, so Malcolm sends in a priest to perform an exorcism – only for Vanessa to bite part of his face off.

The show is as riotous as it is ridiculous, taking the macabre to new heights (or depths). There’s even a great turn by Billie Piper as Irish prostitute Brona Croft. She’s got TB but, still needing to earn some cash, allows Dorian to treat her as his personal plaything. “I’ve never fucked a dying creature before,” he whispers between thrusts. She responds by coughing blood into his face.