Penny Dreadful Teaser: I Believe in Curses

Showtime has released the first teaser for upcoming psychosexual thriller Penny Dreadful and in it, we see the first glimpses of the literary characters whose origin stories the first season will be following.

Created by John Logan (Gladiator) and set to be executive produced by Sam Mendes (American Beauty) and Pippa Harris (Revolutionary Road), Penny Dreadful will weave together the beginnings of Dr. Victor Frankenstein, Count Dracula, and Dorian Gray, among other figures who will come into contact with one another in Victorian London. The series will focus on each character battling the alienation and loneliness they feel as a result of how different they are and how, try as they might, they can never make themselves into the person society wants from them.

Among those slated to star in Penny Dreadful are Josh Hartnett (Black Hawk Down) as Ethan Chandler, an American who gets drawn into the tangled web of darkness that is London; Reeve Carney (Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark) as Dorian Gray, a mesmerizing yet isolated man; Helen McCrory (Skyfall) as spiritualist Madame Kali; Eva Green (Casino Royale) as Vanessa Ives, a seductive heroine who proves herself a complex force to be reckoned with; Billie Piper (Secret Diary of a Call Girl) as an Irish immigrant who came to London to escape her tortured past; and Timothy Dalton (License to Kill) as noted explorer Sir Malcolm, who came to the city while on a special quest.

Production on Penny Dreadful begins this October in preparation for a 2014 premiere. A concrete premiere date likely won’t be revealed until Showtime’s January Television Critics Association session, where the network lays out its plans for the upcoming calendar year. This past session was when the network announced the eight-episode pickup for Penny Dreadful.

Will you be watching Penny Dreadful? Do you think that a horror-thriller can survive on a network like Showtime? Who else would you like to see join the cast?