Sometimes it is better to let sleeping wolfmen lie.
As great as it was, we’re better off without Penny Dreadful Season 4.
Penny Dreadfulseason 3 rode to a close with the double creature features Perpetual Night and The Blessed Dark.
The blood is the life, after all.
Three is a lucky number.
The originalStar Trekseries only lasted three seasons and it became a cult TV phenomenon reprieved by motion pictures.
The magazines appealed to popularly emerging sordid tastes.
Thats also where Sweeney Todd, the demon barber of Fleet Street, came to be.
Stories filled with dread printed on cheap pulp paper, throwaways.
Not meant to last.
The options were the realm of the devil or the realm of God.
That seems appropriate to the tone of the show.
Thats a shocking message for 2016, to tell that story, but thats what it is.
The late nineteenth century was a high point in spiritualist history.
Madame Helena Blavatsky of the Theosophical Society died in 1891.
Arthur Conan Doyle was attending seances and founding the Fortean Society.
Oscar Wilde was reinventing Goth fashion.
France had a museum of the grotesque.
It would soon house the precursor to the grindhouse film, the Grand Guignol.
Everybody who was anybody was getting into the darker side of existence.
The 1890s were a lot like the 1990s.
People expected the end of the world, a phenomenon that happened with every centennial turning of the calendar.
New technology was changing the social landscape.
Still images were being projected in flash serial form to create moving pictures.
Soon these pictures would need stories and short terrifying tales were a natural marriage.
Penny bloods started publishing in the 1830s to keep pacing with growing literacy.
Between 1830 and 1850 there were up to 100 publishers of penny-fiction.
They were renamed Penny Dreadfuls in the 1860s.
They were usually eight or 16 pages long.
The series title was misleading this way.
It had a big budget and told only the most popular of horror stories.
Penny Dreadfultreats these popular horror stories, and the low-budget thrillers of cinema, with the utmost respect.
The series wasHouse of Frankenstein mashed with League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and at least one extraordinary lady.
There are surely other stories to tell now that Vanessa Ives has moved onward and upward.
The penny dreadfuls main fare was highwaymen, robbers who pillaged passing travelers.
Now thatPenny Dreadfultagged its season closer with the words The End, we have WGNsSalemto look forward to.
Both are supernatural thrillers, but they are completely different takes on the genre.
Yet the two shows have so many similarities.
They really like to scare.
They thrill in the cerebral attack because the brain is properly vulnerable while looking the other way.