How Penny Dreadful Reimagined the Bride of Frankenstein

Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! has divided viewers, arriving soon after Guillermo del Toro’s poetic Frankenstein and recasting the Bride of Frankenstein as a statement on gender in Hollywood. That kind of social commentary, however, was already central to Showtime’s Gothic series Penny Dreadful, which used Universal-style monsters to explore modern themes.

Premiering in 2014, Penny Dreadful stars Eva Green as Vanessa Ives and is set in Victorian England, where monsters and dark forces lurk around every corner. Across three seasons Vanessa grapples with a connection to a malign power while allied with figures such as Victor Frankenstein (Harry Treadaway), Dracula (Christian Camargo) and the Wolf Man (Josh Hartnett).

The show gives the Bride trope a distinctly feminist arc through Brona Croft (Billie Piper), a London sex worker who dies of tuberculosis and is revived by Frankenstein as Lily.

England, London

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