Series / Penny Dreadful

"Do you believe there is a demimonde, Mr. Chandler? A half-world, between what we know and what we fear? A place in the shadows, rarely seen but deeply felt? That's where we were last night, where some unfortunate souls are cursed to live always... if you believe in curses, that is."

— Vanessa Ives, to Ethan Chandler, "Night Work"

Penny Dreadful is a Gothic Horror series created by John Logan that premiered in 2014 on Showtime in the US and Sky Atlantic in Britain (the series is a co-production between the two). Taking place in 1891 Victorian Britain, the series weaves together various Public Domain Characters from classic horror literature in a story about the supernatural. It stars Eva Green, Timothy Dalton, Josh Hartnett, Billie Piper, and a slew of other familiar faces.

Very well-received critically, after the season three finale aired on June 19, 2016, Logan announced that Penny Dreadful had ended, as the main story had reached its conclusion.

...Only to announce four months later, on October 31, 2016, that Penny Dreadful would live on as a comic book series called Penny Dreadful: Awaking. Chris King, the show's co-producer, worked on the the comic series. Set six months after the TV finale, it centers on Ethan Chandler, who is finding it difficult to move on in the aftermath of the events of the series.

A comic book Prequel series called Penny Dreadful about Sir Malcolm Murray and Vanessa Ives rescuing Mina from the clutches of a sinister “Master” vampire was published in 2016.

A Spin-Off series, Penny Dreadful: City of Angels, set in 1930s Los Angeles and "infused with Mexican-American folklore and social tension", was announced on November 1, 2018 and premiered on April 26, 2020. It was cancelled after one season.

See here for a recap page.

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Penny Dreadful includes examples of:

#-C

• The Gay '90s: The show begins in 1891 and has the typical Victorian Britain setting of the period, though there are a few anachronisms that only dedicated historians will notice.
• Adaptation Decay: The show plays pretty fast and loose with the details of the various characters it borrows from. Some aspects verge on Twice-Told Tale.
• Adaptation Personality Change:
  • Victor Frankenstein is rather hostile, isolated, and seemingly estranged from his family, as opposed to the book version, who has friends and a family and is engaged to be married. He also rejects the For Science! ideal, viewing science for its own sake to be pointlessly self-aggrandizing.
  • Dorian doesn't show nearly as much remorse for his actions as he does in the book.
  • Mina Murray/Harker. In this telling, it turns out that she probably chose to become a vampire for the purpose of trapping and destroying Vanessa with her as the lure.
• Adaptational Badass: Dorian is indestructible, in contrast to his book counterpart, who is only immune to the visible effects of aging and debauchery. The similar characterization of Dorian in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen likely had an effect.
• Adults Are Useless:
  • The Ives family not only fails to do anything useful during Vanessa's possession, but also turns her over to a Bedlam House.
  • Malcolm rarely saw either of his children until they were young adults. Then, he lets Peter accompany him on a trip to Africa, only to abandon him despite knowing Peter was dying of dysentery to continue exploring.
• The Ageless:
  • Caliban states that he is immortal. Since he seems to believe that a shot to the head would kill him ("Grand Guignol"), he clearly fits this trope better than Complete Immortality.
  • Lily after her resurrection.
  • Dorian is ageless and ancient, which has made him utterly jaded. He's at least as old as Byzantium, which means he's apparently thousands of years old.
  • What Evelyn became after a Deal with the Devil. Staying young was one of her biggest motivations, apparently.
  • The Cut-Wife isn't completely immortal, but considering she knew Oliver Cromwell, she's quite long-lived.
  • Dracula is immortal, as you'd expect.
• Alas, Poor Villain:
  • Despite the fact that Fenton works for the Master and screams about wanting to eat bats, he comes across as rather pathetic (especially to Ethan), and his ending is more pitiful than glorious.
  • The same goes for Renfield in the series finale. His hypnotism session with Dr. Seward is particularly sympathetic.
• All Myths Are True: In season one, we've got Dracula, Frankenstein, The Picture of Dorian Gray, ancient Egyptian gods, Christian saints, and in "Grand Guignol", the Wolf Man. Season two throws witches and a medieval prophecy about fallen angels into the mix, and season three gives us Doctor Jekyll.
• All Women Are Lustful: Vanessa, Brona, Hecate, and Evelyn all prove it.
• Alternate Identity Amnesia:
  • In the beginning of "Seance," Ethan wakes up under the docks with no idea how he got there, or why his hands are all cut up. This is because he's a werewolf.
  • Vanessa storms out of Lyle’s house, still possessed, has sex with a young man in an alleyway, then somehow gets herself back to Sir Malcolm’s to fall asleep in her bed. In "Possession", she claims to "go away" and not remember her experiences at such times.
  • Played with when it comes to Brona/Lily. While at first it doesn't seem like she remembers anything significant from her previous identity, she eventually reveals that she's been faking the whole time.
• Americans Are Cowboys: All American characters in the show come from the West, most of them from New Mexico Territory. The main American character, Ethan Chandler, grew up on a cattle ranch.
• Amnesiacs are Innocent: Played straight in Proteus' case, but eventually averted in Lily's, who takes a murderous turn after an initial child-like phase.
• Anachronism Stew:
  • Much of the clothing in the series shows too much skin for the 1890s, especially the clothing which Dorian Gray wears. No buttoned collar in 1890s Britain? Shame! (Though this is somewhat excused in that he holds semi-regular orgies and is millennia old...) Similarly, the fact that many of the characters go around without gloves is a fashion anachronism which is lampshaded by Gray in "Seance".
  • Sir Malcolm's badass gun, a C96 Broomhandle, was first released in 1896. The year is 1891. (Though it is handwaved as a prototype.)
• Anti-Hero: All of the main characters, save for Brona, though not her new persona, Lily, are at least morally grey.
  • Sir Malcolm put himself ahead of his family, cheated on his wife, and admits to not caring who suffers from his actions if it means achieving his goals. He also spent untold years committing rape, genocide, and who-knows-what else in Africa, allowing his son to die along the way.
  • Ethan seems to be a friendly sort, but it's revealed that he's a werewolf who's responsible for a rash of murders around London. He's also fleeing some bloody business in America: he took part in at least one genocidal attack during the Indian Wars, and in his guilt he later sided with the Apache and planned the reprisal attack that led to his brother, mother, and sister's death..
  • Victor Frankenstein is a junkie who abandoned his first creation and made no attempt to rediscover him. He also murders a woman to create a "bride" for Caliban, resurrects her, and then becomes extremely desirous of her.
  • Vanessa seduced the fiancé of her best friend after allowing herself to become possessed by a demon.
  • Caliban kills two innocent people to punish Frankenstein. He also assaults a woman who spurns his advances.
  • Dorian Grey is a jaded pleasure seeker, though an Adaptation Personality Change keeps him more sympathetic than his book version. At least, until he murders Angelique to protect his secret.
  • Sembene reveals in Season 2 that he was previously a slave trader, and was scarred to mark his sins.
• Anyone Can Die: The show isn't afraid to kill off main characters, but in the show's world, death is not necessarily the end. The most notable characters who have bitten it are Proteus, Van Helsing, Mina Murray, Gladys Murray, Angelique, Roper, Sembene, Evelyn Poole, Brona Croft (well, until she gets resurrected), Justine, and finally, Vanessa Ives herself. In the comic continuation, Malcolm Murray, Dorian Grey, Satan, and Dracula die as well.
• Arbitrary Skepticism: Victor's declaration that "I believe in everything but God" and his dismissal of Ethan's suggestion to call a priest for Vanessa's possession. It gets called out by Ethan and Malcolm in season two when he professes skepticism at the existence of witches, when he's fought things like ghouls and vampires and regularly (though unknown to them) brings people back to life.
• Artificial Zombie:
  • Proteus, who seems to be made of only one person’s reanimated tissue instead of a patchwork of dead bodies. It’s still Victor’s science-y meddling that’s brought him to life.
  • Caliban, Victor’s first Creature, who shows up at the end of “Seance”, is also this. Brona is his next project, and she is resurrected in a different manner than both Proteus and Caliban.
  • The elaborate tattooing and leathery, frequently cracked skin of the vampires suggests an artificial process requiring maintenance.
• Artistic License – Geography: Malcolm travels "inland" from Zanzibar in order to bury Sembene's body in his homeland, despite the fact that he was from Senegal, which is on the opposite side of the African continent.
• Artistic License – History:
  • Catriona Hartdegen mentions that Dracula pitted two great empires against each other in the 13th century, the Ottomans and the Holy Roman Empire. The Ottoman empire was founded in 1299, so it barely existed in the 13th century, and only became a big entity a few decades later.
  • Dorian Gray boasts a haircut that would be far more suited to the 2010s than 1891, as well as sporting plenty of open-necked jewel tone shirts. Possibly justified, since Dorian is always trying to provoke London society in various ways due to his boredom.
  • Sir Malcolm still seems interested in locating the source of the Nile, which was actually identified back in 1875.
  • Lampshaded with Dorian's notice of Vanessa's frequent lack of gloves, in a society where it was required for both men and women to wear them in public.
  • The actual Théâtre du Grand-Guignol opened in 1894, but its shift towards gory horror plays began after 1898. The Grand Guignol was also located in Paris, not London. However, its inclusion unarguably fits the feel of the show.
  • The chyron for Malcolm's October 1892 trip to Africa claims he's in "German East Africa - Zanzibar". Germany ceded Zanzibar to the British as a protectorate in 1890.
  • Jekyll works at the Bethlem Royal Hospital, more notoriously known as 'Bedlam', with patients being beaten and restrained galore. However, while this was unfortunately true of the hospital up to the first half of the nineteenth century, by the 1890s the hospital had been reformed into a place fit for the fragile middle classes, and all the violently criminal patients were packed off to Broadmoor in the 1860s.
• Artistic License – Religion: While Ethan and Vanessa are reciting the Lord's Prayer before Ethan mercy kills her at her own request, they add on "...for Thine is the Kingdom, and the Power, and the Glory, forever and ever," which is typically said by Protestants and not Catholics (both Ethan and Vanessa are explicitly Catholic).
• Asshole Victim:
  • Justine cuts the throat of a man who used her as a sex slave when she was 12, and later tried to murder her in front of a group of men who paid 10 pounds each to see it (in his mind, Justine is worth that much).
  • The bounty hunters chasing Ethan in "Grand Guignol" really are asking for it when he turns into a werewolf and mauls them, killing one and horribly disfiguring the other.
  • Sir Geoffrey in "Little Scorpion" deserves what he gets — being torn to pieces by his own hounds — for attempting to rape Vanessa, branding her, and burning Joan alive.
  • The Putneys in "And They Were Enemies" after locking John Clare in a cage so they could parade him as part of their freak show exhibit.
• The Atoner: Ethan, Sir Malcolm, Vanessa, and Victor all to a certain extent.
• Bad Boss:
  • Evelyn casually slits one underling's throat, then tells the others to "Take that bitch out."
  • Dracula orders his minions to cannibalize a minion who told Vanessa too much. Based on the way the vampires start creeping out of the shadows before Dracula even makes it clear that he wants them to eat the minion in question, he's done this before.
• The Bad Guy Wins: Vanessa succumbs to Dracula in "Ebb Tide," causing the start of the apocalypse.
• Badass Bookworm: Victor takes the prize once he levels up in badass in "Possession" and "Grand Guignol", but Sir Malcolm (who wrote many studies of Africa, speaks at least three languages, and can passably chart a nautical and/or land course) should also be mentioned.
• Badass Longcoat: Malcolm, Ethan, Sembene, Catriona, and Dracula all have them, as they were popular cold-weather fashion for men in the time period.
• Badass Normal: Sembene, who seems to be nothing more than a Battle Butler (and former hunter). There's also Malcolm, who holds his own against the assorted werewolves, witches, and psychics around.
• Bait-and-Switch:
  • Throughout the first two episodes, one is led to believe that Proteus is Frankenstein's first attempt at bringing the dead to life. We discover at the conclusion of "Seance" that he's actually his second attempt, but arguably his first true success, as his first creation is a murderous and bitter man.
  • "Seance" gave the initial impression that Peter died as a young teen, not a grown man, because Vanessa's vocal pitch makes him sound very young. It also gives off the impression that it's Mina whom young Vanessa saw Sir Malcolm having sex with, not Vanessa's mother.
  • The beginning of "Demimonde" shows Vanessa and Dorian flirting, but he winds up sharing an intimate moment with Ethan instead in the end.
  • It's repeatedly hinted that the Bride that the Creature is considering is the actress at the Grand Guignol. The Season 1 finale then reveals a recently-suffocated Brona as Victor's choice.
  • The promos for season 2's first episode had fans thinking that the scarred, naked female figure seen charging down a hallway was a reanimated Brona. It's actually one of the witches.
  • In "Evil Spirits in Heavenly Places", Victor invites Vanessa to tea with Lily, unaware that Vanessa had already met Brona and was aware that she had died. It was assumed that Vanessa would recognise Lily in the next episode, but come the meeting over tea and Vanessa doesn't seem to recognise her at all.
• The Baroness: Evelyn, what with her coldness and her viciousness, is a Sexpot version.
• Battle Amongst the Flames: The fight with the vampire nest aboard the plague ship in "What Death Can Join Together" briefly becomes one of these, as a lit lantern gets knocked over and lights the place aflame.
• Battle Butler: Sembene for Sir Malcolm, though Sir Malcolm is very capable of defending himself.
• Battle in the Center of the Mind:
  • Between Evelyn and Malcolm, with Sembene's help, in "Memento Mori". Sembene manages to break Evelyn's brainwashing, allowing Malcolm to return to his old self.
  • Implied with the confrontation between Vanessa, Lucifer, and Dracula in the asylum. Both Lucifer and Dracula take the form of the orderly, and while Dracula is groping Vanessa, we see occasional flashes of Vanessa alone in the same room groping herself in the same manner.
• Beastly Bloodsports: Dorian takes Ethan to a rat-baiting pit for some gritty entertainment and gambling.
• Beauty Is Never Tarnished:
  • Dorian, whose Healing Factor keeps him from ever showing visible signs of injury.
  • After getting pummeled in the ratting-den, Ethan cleans himself up in Dorian's bathroom... and looks completely uninjured. This is presumably because he is a werewolf.
  • Averted completely by Vanessa. When she is hurt/possessed, you know it, and the effects are visible after the incident.
• Bedlam House:
  • Vanessa was sent to one in an attempt to cure her mysterious illness. She flashes back to it in "Closer Than Sisters" and "A Blade of Grass".
  • Bethlem Royal Hospital itself shows up in season three, as it's where Doctor Jekyll plies his trade.
• Big Bad Ensemble: The series introduces a multitude of major villains, but the true villains are Lucifer and Dracula. The two are fallen angels, split apart from one being, Lucifer cast into hell and feeding upon the souls of mankind, while Dracula walks the earth and feeds off their blood. The two blatantly do not get on, and each seeks Vanessa for their own purposes. In seasons 1 and 2, Dracula's vampiric minions form an ensemble with Lucifer's witch worshipers, led by Evelyn Poole.
• Big Bad Duumvirate: You do NOT want to be in London when Dracula and Vanessa join their powers.
• Big Brother Instinct: Ethan, for Victor and (to some extent, in addition to more romantic feelings he may be harboring) Vanessa.
• The Big Damn Kiss: After a season and a half of Unresolved Sexual Tension, Vanessa and Ethan have one in "Little Scorpion".
• Big Fancy House: Grandage Place, the London residence of Sir Malcolm, Vanessa, and Sembene, and eventually Ethan too. Dorian and Lyle have similarly lavish homes in London, and Evelyn Poole holds court over the Nightcomers at her ancestral mansion on the city's fringe.
• Bilingual Bonus:
  • Sir Malcolm and the lead vampire mook have an entire untranslated conversation in Arabic in "Night Work."
  • Vanessa — or Amunet possessing Vanessa — has an untranslated speech in what is presumably Ancient Egyptian in "Seance."
  • Malcolm and Sembene have a short exchange in Swahili in "Closer than Sisters".
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Both Evelyn Poole and Lavinia Putney in season two. The crowner might be Lily Frankenstein.
• Black-and-Gray Morality: None of our protagonists could ever really be called a "good" person (the closest is probably Brona, and even she is thoroughly cynical and jaded about the world around her), but the forces they oppose are undeniably pure evil (with the possible exception of the Creature, who is still a much darker character than the protagonists).
• Black Dude Dies First: Sembene is unintentionally killed by a transformed Ethan in "And Hell Itself My Only Foe", making him the first member of the main party to die.
• Black Eyes of Evil:
  • During Vanessa's recollection of her imprisonment at the mental hospital, the possessed orderly's eye turn black.
  • What the demon who's plaguing Vanessa flashes to prove he isn't actually whomever he's taken the form of.
  • Sir Malcolm sports these briefly in "Memento Mori" while being possessed, due to Evelyn's power being demonic in nature.
• Black Magic: What Evelyn Poole and her coven practice. Vanessa's mentor in witchcraft, the Cut-Wife, entrusts her with a book of this while on her deathbed, with a warning that opening it will forever cut Vanessa off from God.
• Black Speech: The Verbis Diablo.
• "Blackmail" Is Such an Ugly Word: If Lyle will be Evelyn's double agent in the Grandage Place crew, she won't tell the British Museum about those nasty photos of Lyle with another man.
• Blood Bath: In the episode "Fresh Hell", Evelyn Poole bathes in the blood of a freshly murdered woman while singing "The Unquiet Grave".
• Blood Countess: Madame Kali used to be a member of the nobility, owns a big, scary, Gothic castle, serves the Devil, uses magic, and loves to bathe in the fresh blood of her victims.
• Blood from the Mouth: Brona, thanks to her tuberculosis. At one point, she hocks up a faceful of blood on Dorian Gray — while they are having sex. He doesn't seem to mind in the least. The Creature's son also coughs up blood on occasion.
• Blood Is the New Black: Lily, Dorian, and Justine's blood-soaked threesome.
• Blood Magic: Practiced by the witches. Even Vanessa uses it on a smaller scale for protection purposes.
• Bloody Horror:
  • In the water closet, the opium den, and the morgue in "Night Work".
  • When Proteus is killed by a hand through the torso in "Seance".
  • In a flashback to his childhood, Frankenstein's mother suddenly coughs up a whole lot of blood onto his face.
  • Malcolm killing Fenton by shoving his head into a shard of broken glass.
  • The train massacre in "The Day Tennyson Died", with lots of blood spray and Boom, Headshots!.
  • The aftermath of the massacre at the Cascabel Saloon in "Good and Evil Braided Be", including lots of maggots and bloodspray everywhere.
    • Not to mention Dracula's familiars ravenously chowing down on one of their own in the same episode.
  • Dracula's slaughterhouse lair is decorated with nude human corpses on meat hooks. Multiple familiars are shown grotesquely chowing down on one of them in "No Beast So Fierce."
• Body Horror:
  • Most notably with the Creature and Proteus, but there's also shades of it with Vanessa's possession and the vampires being more insect-like than human.
  • Vanessa's trepanation at the asylum is pretty disturbing to watch. It's even worse when you consider that this is something that really did happen to people.
  • The witches' brand-marks, when they're in Full-Frontal Assault mode, approach this trope if you consider how painful it must've been to acquire them.
• Bond One-Liner: Lyle does a magnificent one after shooting a witch with a Derringer.
  Lyle: Never underestimate the power of a queen with lovely hair, my dear.
• Bondage Is Bad: It's safe to say that Evelyn's probably not aware of the concept of safe words, considering her usage of a riding crop on her late lover in "The Nightcomers".
• Book Case Passage:
  • Victor has a false bookcase that actually functions as a door leading to his laboratory,
  • Dorian, appropriately enough, has the painting variant to disguise the passageway leading to his real portrait.
• Boom, Headshot!: It seems to work pretty well on vampires. Ethan dispatches two of them like this in the pilot, and later, Ethan and Malcolm dispatch more in the same way.
  • The train massacre by Jared Talbot's men is full of incredibly bloody versions of these.
• Bottle Episode: "Possession" is set solely in Grandage Place, as Malcolm, Sembene, Ethan, and Victor attempt to cure Vanessa's possession.
  • "A Blade of Grass" takes place nearly entirely in Vanessa's padded cell from her stay in the asylum.
• Bottomless Magazines: Most of the firearms used are revolvers capable of holding 6 rounds. Characters regularly fire far more than this without stopping to reload.
• Brainwashed: What Evelyn does to Malcolm, with a combination of Black Magic and Compelling Voice.
• Breaking the Fellowship: In the season 2 finale, Ethan is extradited back to America, Malcolm is sailing to Africa to bury Sembene, and the Creature is sailing to some other distant corner of the world. Vanessa and Frankenstein alone are left in London, but Vanessa is convinced she's damned and Victor has just given himself a larger-than-normal dose of morphine after finding out about Lily and Dorian's evil plans.
• Burn the Witch!: Evelyn Poole manipulates the people of Devon to ensure the Cut-Wife's demise via this trope. Unlike most examples, they don't burn Vanessa's mentor at the stake, but suspend her from chains and drench her in tar before setting her alight.
• But Not Too Gay:
  • While the show depicts several heterosexual couplings and (briefly) one between women, the encounter between Dorian and Ethan Chandler gets a sexy discretion shot. In fairness, this may be to to avoid a minor Reveal in an a later episode, when possessed!Vanessa asks, "Did you fuck him, or did he fuck you? He fucked you, didn't he?" Even still, that potential excuse is incredibly flimsy.
• Byronic Hero:
  • Ethan Chandler seems to be one, as he's attractive and charismatic with a hinted-at dark side, and extremely cynical.
  • Victor Frankenstein is one, as he's passionate about his research and beliefs in science and extremely introspective and isolated, with a potentially dark past.
  • Alternately, almost all of the main characters fit the attractive, intelligent, passionate, brooding, damaged, living-outside-society's-norms Byronic Hero mold.
• Call-Back:
  • When Vanessa meets Doctor Seward in "The Day Tennyson Died", she immediately recognizes her as the Cut-Wife (though it's explained by Seward that the Claytons were distant ancestors of hers).
  • "The Day Tennyson Died" also has a bit where zoologist Doctor Sweet muses to Vanessa that he knew she'd love the scorpions and other poisonous things, calling back to "The Nightcomers" and "What Death Can Join Together", as well as Vanessa's childhood hobby of taxidermy (as seen in "Closer Than Sisters").
  • Part of Dracula's conversation with Vanessa at the end of "Ebb Tide" recalls Vanessa and Dr. Sweet's first conversation in "The Day Tennyson Died."
  Dracula: The broken things.
  Vanessa: ...The unloved.
• Calling the Old Man Out:
  • In "Seance", Peter Murray's spirit glares in hatred at Malcolm as he condemns him for leaving his only son behind to die.
  • Vanessa has a version in "Closer than Sisters", as she lays into Malcolm for how hypocritical he is, claiming she doesn't understand blood and evil when she's been possessed by a demon and thrown into an asylum, and that her darkness isn't going to leave when they find Mina.
  • Ethan gets one in "What Death Can Join Together" and then another in "Possession", telling off Malcolm for his Manipulative Bastard actions. Things have gotten so drastic, even Victor joins in on the calling-out.
  • Practically everything Caliban says to Victor in his first few episodes is this trope, chewing his "father" out for abandoning him and saddling him with a grotesque appearance.
• Came Back Wrong: While Brona was jaded and cynical about what was left of her life, she was still probably the most 'heroic' member of the main cast. Lily, meanwhile, through a combination of unpleasant memories from being a prostitute and possibly some part of the resurrection process, is determined to crush mankind under her heel.
• Camp Gay: The Egyptologist Lyle is a closeted gay man, as eventually revealed in "Verbis Diablo," though it's hardly a surprise. He has an extremely foppish manner and outrageous fashion. Even before it's officially confirmed, he flirts shamelessly with Ethan.
• Canon Character All Along:
  • Both Ethan and Brona are eventually revealed to be related to existing horror classics. Ethan, whose real name is Ethan Lawrence Talbot, is Penny Dreadful's version of The Wolfman. Meanwhile, Brona's resurrection in season 2 reveals her as the Bride of Frankenstein.
  • Dr. Alexander Sweet is, unsurprisingly, an alias. His real name is Dracula.
• Celebrity Paradox: Percy Shelley exists in this world, and was quoted in one episode — by Victor, who is a character created by Shelley's wife Mary. Whether this version is married to Mary, or if Mary Shelley even exists in this world, is anyone's guess.
• Charm Person: Evelyn, due to her Compelling Voice.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • Brona's St. Jude medallion that she gives Ethan in "What Death Can Join Together" is used in "Possession" when Ethan uses it, along with a prayer to St. Jude and his own faith in Vanessa, to exorcise Vanessa.
  • The werewolf play at the Grand Guignol in "Demimonde" returns as a Meaningful Echo in "Possession" when Vanessa dreams of Mina repeating the phrase "for claw will slash and tooth will rend/there cannot be a happy end", leading her to realize that Mina is at the theatre. It's also a hint that there actually is a werewolf in this universe — Ethan.
    • This is also a Call-Back to a conversation between Ethan and Victor in "Demimonde" when they're about to perform the transfusion on Fenton:
    Victor: Roll up your sleeve.
    Ethan: Why?
    Victor: We need a subject.
    Ethan: No.
    Victor: Roll up your sleeve, it won't hurt.
    Ethan: That's not a good idea.
  • The trapdoor used during the same play is later triggered by the second vampire to dump Ethan into the sub-level where the vampiresses are waiting.
  • Joan leaves Vanessa two things in "The Nightcomers": the deed to the house on Ballantree Moor, and the book of black magic. Both are utilized in "Little Scorpion", where Ethan and Vanessa flee to Ballantree, and Vanessa uses the grimoire to kill Sir Geoffrey.
• Chekhov's Gunman: Evelyn shows up as "Madame Kali" in the seance at Lyle's house in 1.02, and then again in the gun store flirting with Malcolm in 1.06 before she's properly revealed in season two as the Big Bad.
• Chest Burster: The scene where Victor’s first Creature kills Proteus is staged to resemble this trope, as Caliban punches right through his "younger brother" from behind.
• Chivalrous Pervert:
  • Ethan has sex with at least three near or complete strangers in the first season alone, but he's perfectly honest about the fact that his "peripatetic" lifestyle keeps him from settling down, and he goes out of his way to be nice to women who need help.
  • Dorian is even more so. Being a hedonist, he'll happily sleep with anyone if the opportunity presents itself, but he's always polite, respectful, and makes sure to gain consent before going any further than flirting. Likewise, when he's in an actual relationship with others, he's always the perfect gentleman.
• Cluster F-Bomb:
  • Whatever it is that's possessing Vanessa, it's got quite a potty mouth, particularly in a Country Matters-laden moment when she accuses Sir Malcolm of having illicit sex that Vanessa spied on.
  • Lily out-swears even Amunet when she breaks her "amnesiac" facade in her confrontation with the Creature.
• Cobweb Jungle: Taken to Dickensian levels in Season 3, when Sembene's absence from Grandage Place and Vanessa's depression mean the house succumbs to neglect, dereliction, and several productive spiders.
• Coitus Uninterruptus:
  • Vanessa and a stranger have sex in a public alleyway, and don't seem bothered by the guy watching them.
  • Later, Dorian pays Brona Croft to participate in a risqué photography shoot, which escalates to sex in front of the cameraman.
  • Vanessa gets caught having sex with Mina's fiance, but Vanessa just stares at Mina without stopping or letting the fiance know.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience:
  • When young Victor's mother is alive, he is a bright, curious, poetic boy in all white. When she dies, he wears all black and tosses aside his books of poetry for texts on human biology and anatomy.
  • When they are children, Mina and Vanessa are seen in white and pale colors. After Vanessa's possession and Mina's abduction, Mina continues to wear white, but Vanessa wears black from that moment on.
• Compelling Voice: Evelyn has one that she utilizes to enchant her victims into obeying her wishes.
• Conlang: The language used in season two (Verbis Diablo) is a fictional amalgam of Aramaic, Ancient Greek, Latin, and an obscure Arabic dialect called (in phonetic English) "Kan Allah Musali-Algins". Verbis Diablo was created specifically for the show by (who else?) linguist David J. Peterson, who has also created languages for shows such as Game of Thrones and The Shannara Chronicles.
• Con Man: Ethan Chandler, who as part of his Western show claims to have fought the Sioux with Custer, but in reality he would only have been a small boy then. Vanessa calls him on it.
• Conspicuous Consumption: All of the rich characters wear sumptuous clothes (especially Vanessa and Dorian) and live in mansions, even if living alone. Lyle takes the cake in this department though, as even Dorian makes fun of his tacky decor.
• Conspicuous Gloves: Inverted. In an era where they are almost mandatory for women and men alike, Vanessa never wears gloves. Dorian specifically remarks upon this as an aspect of her character.
• Corpse Land:
  • The opium den that Sir Malcolm, Ethan and Vanessa visit — the floor is covered with bodies.
  • Dracula's lair is an old warehouse with meat hooks hung from the ceiling. When Malcolm, Victor, and Dr. Seward are creeping through, there are corpses hung on every single one.
• Cover Identity Anomaly: Hecate's plucky American adventuress disguise in "Evil Spirits in Heavenly Places" would work on anyone but Ethan Chandler. Even discounting his werewolf senses and his distrust of strangers (as they tend to be agents sent by his father), she makes a number of errors that no true American would make: someone from Maine wouldn't have a nonspecific Standard American/Midwestern accent, and Northwestern University is in Illinois, not Indiana.
• Crapsack World: Aside from the misanthropic deities, bloodthirsty night creatures, and self-serving occultists, Victorian England is consistently portrayed as a racist, classist, sexist, and nationalist cesspool with some debauchery for good measure. It’s not even restricted to Victorian England as America and Northern Africa are depicted as possessing more or less the same qualities in Season 3. The closest thing the series has to an actual, on-the-ground force for Heaven is the Lupus Dei, a werewolf who butchers innocent men, women, and children. It makes the presence of decent or (self-improving) characters all the more poignant.
• Creating Life Is Unforeseen: Played with in Proteus's case: while Victor evidently did intend to bring him to life, it's a storm-triggered malfunction of his lab equipment that animates his stitched-up body before Victor can throw the switch.
• Creepy Doll: Evelyn's collection of victims, all recreated in doll form with the organs of babies inside them.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: This show seems to adore this trope:
  • Proteus is ripped apart by the Creature's bare hands, along his chest seam, into two pieces.
  • Fenton is impaled by a shard of glass through the back of his head by Sir Malcolm.
  • The Cut-Wife is hung from chains by her wrists, drenched with oil, and set on fire by the villagers.
  • Sembene and Evelyn are both victims of Ethan's werewolf side, getting their throats torn out.
  • On Dracula's command, one of his familiars is cannibalized by the other familiars.
• Cruel Mercy:
  • John Clare kills the Putneys after he escapes from his cell, leaving Lavinia alive to discover her parents' corpses.
  • Lily and Dorian choose to let Victor survive after he discovers that they're immortal so that he can live with the knowledge of the monsters he's created.
  • As a cavalry officer, Ethan participated in the massacre of an Apache family and was so ashamed of himself and what he'd done that he rode to the sole survivor, Kaetenay, and begged him to kill him. Kaetenay refused to kill him and adopted him into the tribe, forcing him to live with the shame of what he'd done.
• Cultured Badass: Sir Malcolm. Respected scholar, famous explorer, big game hunter, vampire killer.

D-G

• Damsel in Distress: Saving Mina from the Master is the A plot of Season One. Subverted when it turns out's she's really a Decoy Damsel.
• Dark Is Not Evil: True of most of the main cast. Some of them are indeed very dark, but they're on the side of Saving the World. Mostly.
• A Day in the Limelight:
  • Most of "Resurrection" is dedicated to the Creature's interactions with Frankenstein, as well as both of their backstories.
  • "Closer Than Sisters" is entirely centered on Vanessa and her relationship to the Murrays.
  • "The Nightcomers" is about what Vanessa was doing between the asylum and showing up at Sir Malcolm's, namely studying witchcraft with a woman named "the Cut-Wife of Ballantree Moor".
  • "This World Is Our Hell" focuses on the New Mexico storyline, with Ethan revealing his backstory to Hecate, Malcolm and Kaetenay bonding, Rusk tracking Ethan, and our first glimpse of Jared Talbot, Ethan's father.
• Deadpan Snarker:
  • Victor Frankenstein.
  Well, it would appear you have an Egyptian man of no particular age, who, at some point in his indeterminate lifespan decided to sharpen his teeth, cover himself in hieroglyphics, and grow an exoskeleton. Or you have something else altogether.
  • Brona Croft, at least when she's alone with Ethan.
• Deal with the Devil:
  • Where Evelyn got her powers — and her looks — from. She doesn't age, or at least, Joan claims she hasn't aged since the mid-1600's.
  • Vanessa is being relentlessly hounded by the Devil to make one. In episode 7 of season 3, she finally does — although it's with the Devil's brother Dracula, not Lucifer himself.
• Death by Adaptation:
  • Mina Murray is turned into a vampire and then killed.
  • Abraham Van Helsing appears briefly before being unceremoniously killed by Caliban, purely to send a message to Victor.
• Death of a Child: A girl of around six dies in the very first scene of "Night Work", Hecate kills an actual baby in "Verbis Diablo" for Evelyn to use in her black magic, and in "The Day Tennyson Died", Caliban snaps a young boy's neck so he won't freeze to death.
• Decoy Antagonist:
  • The second episode introduces Proteus in a manner that deliberately fools the audience into believing that he's Victor Frankenstein's famous Creature, and that his cordial relationship with Victor will inevitably give way to hostility. Nope. We learn that he isn't Frankenstein's first creation when the Creature — the real Creature — shows up and brutally murders Proteus at the conclusion of the second episode.
  • The "master" vampire featured throughout the first season, despite controlling a small army of mook vampires, is just a powerful mook himself. The true Master, Dracula, finally appears in Season 3.
• Demonic Possession: Vanessa is frequently possessed by the Devil, when he's not appearing to her and speaking to her directly.
• Demonic Vampires: All vampires are descended from Dracula, who is revealed to have been one of the two leaders, alongside his brother Lucifer, of the fallen angels who rebelled against God and were cast down from Heaven, except that whereas Lucifer was banished to Hell, Dracula was exiled to Earth.
• Different World, Different Movies: Vanessa name-drops Percy Bysshe Shelley when quoting one of his poems. Shelley's wife Mary wrote Frankenstein, which is real in this universe.
• Dirty Business: Ethan feels great distress at the gang's rough treatment of Fenton.
• Disposable Sex Worker:
  • The woman in the opening scene of "Seance".
  • Averted (initially) with Brona, who receives a personal, sympathetic treatment, but when Victor murders her and turns her into "Lily", it's played straight.
  • Angelique, in "Memento Mori".
• Distracted by the Sexy: Attempted, in an amusingly Victorian way, by Vanessa. When Victor shows up to re-examine the vampire body, Sir Malcolm orders her to unbutton the top of her dress to expose more of her neck. Not her cleavage, just her neck. Subverted in that it doesn't seem to work.
• Does Not Like Men: Amunet seems to regard "you man" as an insult, judging by how she berates Sir Malcolm in "Seance" and her caregivers in "Possession".
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: In the last episode, Dracula compels Vanessa to give in to her Superpowered Evil Side and become an Apocalypse Maiden whose power he intends to use to conquer the world so that "the hidden ones" may emerge from the shadows and rule. Vanessa, however, restrains her powers long enough for the man she loves (who is part wolf) to get close enough to kill her. Yeah, it's basically X-Men: The Last Stand.
• Downer Ending:
  • The first season ends with the deaths of both a main and a recurring character and a romantic break-up.
  • The second season's finale confirms the death of another main character and scatters three of them to the far corners of the Earth, leaving one of those remaining in London bereft of faith and the other driven into a drugged stupor by guilt.
  • While the series finale reverses the imminent apocalypse, Vanessa begs Ethan to kill her in order to stop it, which he does. Dracula escapes unscathed, leaving both he and Lucifer to hunt down the next reincarnation of Amunet. The entire group is back together, but they're all rattled to the core by Vanessa's death. John Clare loses the only family he's ever had. Dorian disbands Lily's army of prostitutes, and she's left to wander the world alone.
• Driven to Suicide:
  • Sir Malcolm's wife, in a Murder the Hypotenuse gambit by Evelyn Poole.
  • Vanessa herself, via Ethan, after she surrenders to Dracula and starts the apocalypse.
• Dropped a Bridge on Him:
  • Both Proteus and Van Helsing are unceremoniously killed by the Creature, both times to send Frankenstein a message.
  • Evelyn's death in "And They Were Enemies" comes off as this. Instead of a no-holds-barred magical battle between Evelyn and Vanessa, Vanessa spends the finale talking to a doll, and Evelyn suddenly has her throat torn out by werewolf!Ethan.
• Dysfunction Junction:
  • Vanessa is pursued by witches, vampires, devils, and ghosts; has lost almost everyone she knew as a child; and suffers from such a morbid fear of sex that it opens a psychological pathway for a demon that wants to possess her when she finally does have satisfying sex.
  • Malcolm abandoned his family for most of his life, "waded through blood with every step" and raped his way across the Congo during his adventures in Africa, and winds up killing his own daughter, who has become The Dragon for a vampire. He has never been happily married, and when he finally falls in love with a woman, she turns out to be an evil, Satan-worshipping witch using him as bait for Vanessa.
  • Ethan struggles to keep ahead of the consequences of his lycanthropy, meaning that he needs to constantly move from place to place even though he experiences strong attachments to people he's barely met. He also has a very dark past: an abusive father, a stint as an American cavalry officer who participated in the genocide of Apaches, and finally, a botched raid on his father's ranch that got his brother stabbed to death, his mother scalped, and his younger sister's eyes gouged out.
  • Dorian has become so bored with life that he unsuccessfully tries to stimulate emotion with rat-baiting and orgies. He murders Angelique for discovering his portrait, despite her acceptance of his immortality.
  • Brona was an abused wife who turned to prostitution and can't accept love from the only person who cares about her. She is then suffocated by Victor, reanimated by him, and intended to be a "bride" for Caliban. Small wonder she violently rebels against both of them, teaming up with Dorian, whom she feels is more worthy of her.
  • Victor is a morphine addict who abandoned his first Creature. He's extremely antisocial, but also so punishingly lonely and starved for romance that he'll fondle a corpse intended for Caliban, wistfully yearning for a mate of his own.
  • The Creature is obsessed with being "given" his own bride, and doesn't draw much of a distinction between stalking and affection. He frequently kills people simply to send messages to Victor.
• Eerie Pale-Skinned Brunette: Vanessa, Evelyn, Hecate, and Justine.
• Egyptian Mythology: A large facet of this universe, if only in season 1.
  • In “Night Work”, the vampire is revealed to be of Egyptian origin, utilizing spells carved in hieroglyphics on his chest.
  • In “Seance”, the goddess Amunet possesses Vanessa. Mr. Lyle the Egyptologist reveals the meaning of the hieroglyphs on the vampire corpse — they’re a resurrection spell, invoking Amunet and her counterpart Amun-Ra. If they ever came together, it would bring about the end of the world, and Amunet’s spirit has chosen Vanessa.
• Electromagnetic Ghosts: The classic "lights-dimming" example, though interestingly enough, the manifestation of Mina Murray also causes this. Whether that manifestation is a ghost or a vampire is unknown.
• Emotional Bruiser: Despite being a hired gun, Ethan is much more emotionally open than most of the other characters. Caliban is also super-strong and rather mopey, although it doesn't seem to make him any nicer.
• Empathic Environment: Season 3's opener, "The Day Tennyson Died", finds all of the heroes at their lowest points, sunken deep into stagnancy and depression; the world outside is also grey and melancholic, the city of London mourning for the death of the last great poet Tennyson.
• Establishing Character Moment:
  • Josh Hartnett has indicated that he regards the moment when Ethan (who's in a ridiculous costume for a Wild West show) pulls off one mustache to reveal another mustache is this for his character.
  • In Dorian's first scene, he shows that he's the kind of guy who holds porn shoots in his home... and proceeds to get really bored until his model hacks up a bunch of tuberculosis-ridden blood. Then he propositions her, because "I've never fucked a dying creature before." It also establishes that he is strangely charming, greeting his prostitute/model as "Miss Croft," thanking her for attending, and inspiring real (if puzzled) reciprocal attraction during their encounter.
  • Vanessa's is her Sherlock Scan of Ethan in the bar, showing her mysteriousness, intelligence, perceptiveness, and blunt nature.
  • Malcolm is introduced in the opium den as a man on a mission (to save his daughter) who cares very little for anyone and everyone in his way.
• Ethereal White Dress:
  • Mina, perhaps to heighten the weirdness of her scenes as a vampire.
  • Brona, after she's brought back as "Lily" by Frankenstein, also frequently wears white.
  • Vanessa wears white in the fantasy-reality Lucifer spins for her in "And They Were Enemies."
• Even the Guys Want Him: Dorian, as shown in "Demimonde". Also, Ethan seems to inspire admiration and lust from Victor, Dorian, Lyle, and possibly Inspector Rusk.
• Everyone Meets Everyone: "Night Work", the first episode.
• Everyone Went to School Together: At least, Victor Frankenstein and Henry Jekyll did.
• Evil Is Not a Toy: Implied to be the source of both Vanessa's supernatural powers and Malcolm's missing daughter.
  Vanessa: Was I not responsible? But for my transgression, would any of this have occurred?
  • "Closer Than Sisters" reveals that her "transgression" was giving into the temptations of whatever it is possessing her, leading to her sleeping with Mina's fiance, which drove Mina away and presumably into the clutches of the master vampire.
• Evil Sounds Deep: Both Vanessa's demon ("Soon, child. Soon.") and Dracula, when he turns Renfield.
• Evolving Credits: Season 1 delayed showing Caliban's face or his actor's name until The Reveal that he existed. Season 2's montage replaces a clip of vampire-lackey Fenton with one of the scarred-up witches, as the series' primary antagonists have changed. Season 3 replaces the first witch with Hecate, and adds a shot of Lily revealing her true vicious nature to Caliban.
• Extremely Dusty Home: Grandage Place is a home designed to be serviced by a large staff. Instead, it's kept going by Sembene alone, who keeps the open areas clean but lets the unused parts fall into this trope. When he dies and everyone leaves but Vanessa, who is severely depressed, the entire house deteriorates to the point of looking completely abandoned.
• Fan Disservice: A lot of the show's viewers were eagerly awaiting a nude scene with Eva Green. When it finally happens in "Closer Than Sisters"... it's utterly terrifying. The same goes for her nude scene in "A Blade of Grass".
• Fanservice Extra: Dorian hosts an orgy with attractive naked people wandering around his gallery, although their charms don't seem to be working on him.
• Fantastically Indifferent: Dorian admits he's not human to Ethan, who doesn't evince any surprise or concern over the revelation. He's a werewolf, so someone else also being not human is hardly that shocking to him.
• Fantastic Catholicism: In "Possession", a priest is brought in to exorcise Vanessa. The priest refuses, because it's serious business and requires Rome's permission, so eventually Ethan must do it himself using Latin prayers and the image of a Catholic saint.
• Femme Fatale:
  • Vanessa subverts the trope. Although she initially appears as a mysterious, black-lace-clad woman hiring a gunslinger, she doesn't use sex to manipulate and has more agency than most Femmes Fatales.
  • Evelyn Poole is definitely one of these. She's a mysterious widow who wears a fascinator, has a scandalous job as a spiritualist, an affinity for guns, and oh yes, she's a Satan-worshipping witch. She uses her feminine charms (and her Compelling Voice) to manipulate Malcolm.
  • Evelyn's daughter Hecate is one, with varying degrees of success, considering she's sent by her mother to occupy Ethan while they target Vanessa, doesn't actually succeed in doing anything but making Ethan more suspicious, and offers to team up with him if he'll ally with the witches. She has more luck in season three, when she and Ethan are thrown together on a trek through the New Mexico desert. She actually does manage to manipulate Ethan into allying with Lucifer this time, if only until she dies.
• First-Episode Twist: Sir Malcolm’s missing daughter is named Mina, that nice young man at the mortuary is Dr. Victor Frankenstein, and Vanessa is possessed by something demonic.
• A Foggy Day in London Town: In the final two episodes of the show, London is covered by a magically-created toxic fog.
• For Want Of A Nail: Vanessa's entire life was ruined essentially due to the absence of two locked doors — one in the Murray household, and one in her own.
• Foreshadowing:
  • Ethan's ability to seemingly control wolves hints at the reveal in the season 1 finale: he's a werewolf.
  • The play's line "for claw will slash and tooth will rend/there cannot be a happy end". The season 1 finale features Ethan slashing his father's thugs; vampiresses chomping on Ethan, Sembene, and Victor,; and Sir Malcolm gunning down Mina when he realizes she's willingly become a monster and lured Vanessa into the Master's trap. Oh, and Brona is euthanized by Victor.
  • Mina lures Vanessa and co. to the London Zoo, where they come across Fenton, and the camera lingers on a sign that reads "The Gardens of the Zoological Society of London." In season 3, Dracula poses as a zoologist and works among taxidermy animals in the London Natural History Museum.
• A Form You Are Comfortable With:
  • Lucifer first appears to Vanessa in the guise of the orderly, then as Sir Malcolm, and again as Ethan.
  • Dracula also takes the form of the orderly the first time he and Vanessa meet. However, even his human form is a mere disguise for an unkillable, inhuman form that Catriona teases in "Ebb Tide," but ultimately goes unseen.
• Frankenstein's Monster: The first creature we see Frankenstein awaken is actually a simple revived corpse, rather than a monstrous, patchwork creation. Instead of cruelly abandoning him and earning his hatred, Frankenstein paternally nurtures and educates the revived man. Eventually it's revealed that this is actually Frankenstein's second creation. The real Frankenstein's monster really was a hideous patchwork who was abandoned and now hates his maker. Eventually a Bride of Frankenstein is also created, who is also a revived corpse.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus:
  • Sir Malcolm's letter to Frankenstein reveals his last name (Murray) before The Reveal.
  • A newspaper has an advertisement for Dr. Jekyll. He shows up in season three.
• Freudian Excuse: Hecate claims this for her alignment with Lucifer; she was given to Lucifer by Evelyn when she was five years old.
• Full-Frontal Assault: The witches in season two are naked, hairless, and heavily scarred whenever they attack in their true forms.
• Functional Addict: Victor, who was given cocaine to control his childhood asthma and moved on to morphine as an adult.
• Game Face: The young witches in season two normally look like beautiful women, but when they attack they are naked, hairless, scarred, and bestial-looking.
• Gaslamp Fantasy: Most of the series is set in 1890s Britain with a band of 18th-19th century literary characters banding together to fight Satan.
• Genius Bruiser: Ethan's knack for bar fighting and sharpshooting leads Malcolm to regard him as nothing but "a finger on a trigger". It turns out that he has some knowledge of, among other things: Latin, Catholic saints, general theology, Apache culture and rituals, colognes, opera, tracking and weapons.
• Genre Shift: Ethan's arc in the US during Season Three takes a break from the general Gaslight Fantasy and Gothic Horror tone of the show and introduces a Weird West element.
• Getting Smilies Painted on Your Soul: Jekyll's serum does this to anyone who is injected with it, forcing them to become pleasant and docile by wiping all pain, malice, and bad experiences from their brain. A man who planned to assassinate the Queen is dosed with it, and when he awakens, he cannot fathom ever harming someone he loves as much as the Queen. Victor plans to enact this trope on Lily, but when she pleads to be allowed to remember her daughter as Brona, because despite how traumatic the memory is losing someone she loves so much would be even worse, he realizes that to erase a person's bad memories is to erase part of who they are, and doesn't go through with it.
• Girly Skirt Twirl: Vanessa, in 1x06, when she shows off her theatre dress for Malcolm.
• Gone Horribly Right: When Victor actually succeeded in reanimating a patchwork corpse, the sight terrified him into immediate flight.
• Good Bad Girl: Both Vanessa and Brona enjoy premarital sex and are as close to "good guys" as anyone on the show.
• Good Scars, Evil Scars:
  • Sembene has ritual scarring on his face, marking him as a slave trader.
  • Proteus has a few noticeable scars on the back of his head, keeping his face normal and innocent-looking.
  • Caliban has huge jagged scars along one side of his face, giving him a monstrous appearance.
  • The witches' true forms have ritual scars in various shapes carved into their flesh. Most have inverted pentagrams on their chests.
• Gorgeous Period Dress: Mostly for Vanessa, since she can afford it, even though she's in half-mourning. Evelyn and Hecate Poole, as befitting their wealthy status, also wear them. Angelique wears them. Lily takes a liking to them, though not corsets. Other women tend to wear more reserved, neutral-toned outfits.
• Gothic Horror: The show's bread and butter.
• Gratuitous Latin: As all good Catholics of the day would have done, Vanessa prays the "Hail Mary" and the "Our Father" in Latin.
• Great White Hunter: A staple of the period, Sir Malcolm is this, having spent years in Africa and having encountered many fantastic creatures. As with all other Gothic Horror Tropes, this is very distinctly deconstructed by the narrative.
• The Grotesque: Caliban. His skin is deathly pale, and his facial scars are rather hideous. Despite his rather brutal murders of Proteus and Van Helsing, it's clear that he very much wishes to be normal, and he has been more often a victim than a victimizer.
• Guns Are Worthless: Surprisingly averted for a supernatural series, as most supernatural nasties like vampires and transformed witches go down with a couple regular rounds just like normal humans would. The only corporeal supernaturals who are Immune to Bullets are the immortals, like Dorian and Frankenstein's creations, and Dracula, who simply dodges them.
• The Gunslinger: Ethan Chandler, who is introduced showcasing his skills as part of a traveling Wild West show.

H-K

• Hall of Mirrors:
  • Dorian Gray has one leading up to the hidden chamber where he keeps his portrait.
  • Dracula takes Vanessa to one on a date that ends badly.
• Haunted Heroine: Vanessa Ives has ghosts, demons, sexual issues, and, at least in the flashbacks, a lot of people who didn't believe a word she said.
• Heartbroken Badass: Vanessa and Malcolm will kill every vampire in the world if that's what it takes to save Mina. Cemented as of the season two premiere.
  • Ethan when Brona dies, supposedly of consumption, but actually from Victor suffocating her.
• He Who Fights Monsters: Both Sir Malcolm and Ethan Chandler, for different reasons.
  • Sir Malcolm has taken the loss of his daughter personally, and wants to hunt down every vampire or supernatural creature he can lay his hands on. He also, due to his own arrogance and neglect, lost his son in Africa, and fought numerous horrors there.
  • Ethan has "sins at his back", and doesn't seem to be opposed to killing for money. As of his werewolf reveal, it's likely he's been forced to kill in the past and considers working as muscle-for-hire to be a pragmatic gain. Said "sins" include the massacres of Apache women and children, and the unwitting murder of his entire family, save his father.
• Hemo Erotic:
  • When Brona coughs up blood during sex with Dorian, he smiles and laps it up. He does the same thing to Lily after she's been shot by Victor.
  • During a sex scene between Vanessa and Dorian, he gives her a knife. She lacerates his torso and licks the blood.
  • Dorian, Lily, and Justine have a threesome soaked in the blood of a man Justine had just killed.
• Hero Antagonist: Inspector Rusk is dedicated to bringing Ethan to justice, even though Ethan is a protagonist.
• Hero of Another Story: Van Helsing makes an appearance, but his exploits in Dracula never take place, as he is murdered by Caliban shortly thereafter. He does serve as Victor's consulting expert on vampires until his death, having lost his wife to one and developed a chemical that can help distinguish vampire blood from human.
• Heroic BSoD:
  • In 'Seance,' the grief and Tranquil Fury in the aftermath of Vanessa's multiple possessions leaves Sir Malcolm sitting melancholically at the table, even after others have left.
  • Frankenstein has one when Caliban rips Proteus apart, covered in blood and unable to move.
  • He has another one when Caliban snaps Van Helsing's neck.
  • Ethan, Malcolm, and Victor all have one long, extended one throughout the week they spend trying to care for the possessed Vanessa, unsure if she'll survive.
  • Vanessa has one in "Fresh Hell" when the witches attack her and Ethan. We eventually learn that Vanessa has prior experience with this coven and is terrified they'll kill her at last.
  • Malcolm hits another one in "And They Were Enemies" when he discovers Sembene's body and later mourns the loss of his companion deeply.
• Hidden Depths:
  • We eventually learn that Sir Malcolm, for all his faults, works in a shelter for people who suffer from cholera whenever he can and provides them with funds.
  • Baby-killing witch Hecate actually likes animals, and finds them far preferable to people.
• High-Pressure Blood: The climax of the Grand Guignol werewolf play.
• Hooker with a Heart of Gold:
  • Brona Croft being a sex worker doesn't keep her from being a sympathetic and generally kind person.
  • Angelique is this trope. She's quite charming, shows a lot of interest in Dorian, and doesn't seem to let her profession bother her.
• Hookers and Blow: Or, as Dorian calls them, daily life.
• Humans Are Bastards: "And Hell Itself My Only Foe" has Oscar Putney deliver this explanation to Caliban as to why no one will help him:
  "Scream your lungs out, if you like. No one will hear you. And even if they could, who would care? You know Londoners, what care they for the sufferings of malformed brutes. They will look, and they will point, and they will pay."
• Hunter of Monsters: Malcolm Murray and Sembene are ones. Ethan Chandler is about to become one. Bartholomew Rusk's chase of Ethan through the New Mexico desert turns him into one.
• I Am a Monster:
  • Malcolm delivers a speech on this while talking with Victor in "Possession."
  "No, Doctor, I haven't a shred of decency left."
  • Dracula in "Ebb Tide," although he doesn't seem bothered by it; in fact, considering later events, he probably relishes it.
  "That's the man I am... and the monster."
• I Have No Son!: In Sir Malcolm's case, daughter. Seeing what Mina has become forces him to kill his own daughter, but in the process he saves Vanessa's life, proving to her that he is her father figure and to him, a real daughter of his.
• "I Know You're in There Somewhere" Fight: "Memento Mori" has Evelyn and her Satan-assisted brainwashing battling Malcolm and Sembene for Malcolm's soul. Sembene shouts for Malcolm to remember who he is, and it's his friend's faith in him that allows Malcolm to break Evelyn's spell.
• I Let Gwen Stacy Die: Malcolm allowed his son Peter to die in Africa. Notably, this action does not spur him to become more heroic, but more villainous.
• I Never Told You My Name: In the fifth episode, Doctor Banning is visibly startled and summons security when Vanessa, whilst possessed, uses his full name... which she has no way of knowing.
• Immortality Bisexuality: Dorian has existed as an immortal long enough to enjoy the company of both sexes.
• Immortality Inducer: Victor's machines, which harness the electricity generated by thunderstorms to bring his creations to life, and as a side effect, immortality.
• Important Haircut: In "Verbis Diablo", Victor performs one of these on a recently revived Brona/Lily, ostensibly to alter her appearance enough that no one from her previous life will recognise her from a distance...but also, possibly, to shape her further into his ideal woman.
• Improbable Aiming Skills:
  • Ethan, who has an entire sharpshooting act built on this. (Werewolf reflexes and perceptual improvements may help.)
  • Evelyn, who can not only manage six straight bulls-eyes with a revolver on a shooting range, but master Malcolm's new automatic Mauser on the first try, and make a few more bulls-eyes (one of which, she does with one eye open). Of course, she is an immortal Satan-worshipping witch, and it's probably not all natural ability.
  • Also Vanessa when taught how to shoot in "Little Scorpion". It's handwaved as her having a good eye and assistance from her witchy powers.
• Incest Subtext:
  • Though Victor is not the biological father of any of his "creations", they refer to themselves as his children (and to each other as siblings). Many fans have interpreted homoerotic tension between Victor and Caliban (and Victor and Proteus), and he actually had sex with Lily. This gets amped up in the season 2 finale, wherein Proteus calls him "father", Caliban calls him "brother", and Lily calls him "lover", all in the context of his children confronting him for his sins.
  • There's also whatever was going on in the Murray-Ives households, where Vanessa and Malcolm seem to be bound by something more than friendship, and Malcolm admits in a dark moment that he sees Vanessa as "the daughter [he] deserves".
• Incurable Cough of Death: Brona and Caliban's son have consumption (i.e. tuberculosis); heavy coughs that bring up blood, and which everyone views as incurable, are kind of a given.
• Instant Marksman: Just Squeeze Trigger!:
  • Played straight in the scene where Ethan teaches Victor how to shoot. He manages to hit a bottle on his third try, and just a day or so later, is able to shoot three of the vampires during the battle at the Grand Guignol. His training as a surgeon, requiring steady hands and solid nerves, probably helps.
  • Averted with Malcolm's new automatic pistol (a C96 Broomhandle) in "Grand Guignol" — it's so new that virtually no one has experience with it, and his first attempts with the thing ricochet everywhere. He eventually figures it out.
  • Played straight again with Vanessa in "Little Scorpion" when Ethan teaches her to shoot. It's even acknowledged she's naturally good at this, which Ethan doesn't find surprising.
• Instant Seduction:
  • Ethan impresses an audience member with his sharpshooting skills, then has sex with her in his next scene. He also has sex with Brona on their first date.
  • Vanessa walks up to a guy in the street and licks his face. Next thing you know, they're having sex against the wall of a building.
  • Dorian seduces Brona in one meeting, despite the fact that she's presumably only getting paid for the modeling.
• Ironic Echo: In the third episode, Frankenstein calls his first Creature a demon. A few minutes later, the insult is flung right back at him.
• Ironic Nursery Tune: The song The Unquiet Grave shows up numerous times in the series:
  • It first appears in "Seance", sung by the possessed Vanessa at the seance.
  • It comes back in "Closer than Sisters", sung by young Vanessa and later older Vanessa, both times while walking the hedge maze.
  • In "Fresh Hell", it's our introduction to Evelyn Poole, who is singing it while bathing in a bathtub of blood.
  • It's hummed by Malcolm the morning after he and Evelyn have sex while he is firmly under her mind control in "Glorious Horrors".
  • Finally, in "And They Were Enemies", a very serene Hecate Poole sings it as she liberates her mother's spellbook and tools, and torches the castle, burning her mother's body and all inside it.
  • Caliban sings a bit of "All Through the Night" right before he snaps a young boy's neck to keep him from freezing to death.
• Jack the Ripper: A killer is dismembering people around London, and people are asking, "Is Jack back?" The killer is actually Ethan in werewolf form.
• Jerkass Has a Point:
  • Caliban really didn't need to kill Proteus, but he has every right to be furious at Frankenstein for the way he treated him.
  • Amunet may be a bitch, but many of her vicious chastisements of Sir Malcolm are well-deserved.

• Jumping Off the Slippery Slope: Victor has been at loose ends with his creations (the loss of Lily especially), but it's in season three — particularly in "Good and Evil Braided Be", when he unlocks the secret behind combining his work with galvanism with Jekyll's formula to produce a permanent change in a subject — that he really sets himself on the path toward eventual doom.
• Keystone Army: In "Grand Guignol", the vampire 'brides' collapse the moment Malcolm kills the head vampire — with the exception of Mina, indicating that there was something different about her, perhaps her being a bride of the Master she indicates is still 'alive'.
• Killed Off for Real: Sembene in the penultimate episode of season two, and Evelyn Poole in the season two finale.
• Knight Templar Parent: Malcolm likes to think of himself as one for Mina — see, for example his "to save her, I would murder the world" speech — but in all actuality, he abandoned both his biological children, and values Vanessa over them.
• Kukris Are Kool: Sembene carries them.

L-O

• Lady and Knight: Vanessa and Ethan's relationship has this dynamic, especially in the second season.
• Large Ham: Everyone who works at the Grand Guignol. With Vincent and Caliban, this carries over into their offstage lives.
• Let's Split Up, Gang!: This happens to the company when they go to rescue Vanessa and Sir Malcolm from Evelyn Poole's clutches. They do remain in teams, but are quickly isolated from one another.
• Light Feminine Dark Feminine: An interesting variation — Vanessa is one of our heroes, but is virtually always seen in dark colors, whereas Mina (and the Brides) wear all white and serve evil. It’s most striking in Vanessa’s beach vision, where Mina and her blonde hair are all in white, and Vanessa herself wears a hooded black cloak and dress.
• Lightning Can Do Anything: Caliban, Proteus, and Brona all come to life on dark and stormy nights. "Fresh Hell" makes clear that Frankenstein needs the lightning to reanimate corpses.
• Literary Allusion Title: A "penny dreadful" was a serialized fiction story appearing in Victorian newspapers. They were frequently filled with lurid, sensationalized content — sex, death, the supernatural.
• Living Bodysuit: In “Seance”, Vanessa is possessed by, in order, younger and older versions of Sir Malcolm's son Peter Murray, Amunet, Mina Murray, and finally the demon that's already possessing her.
• Looks Like Orlok: The leader vampires seen in season one. Averted with Dracula, however. It seems that his status as the first vampire allows him to take a completely human appearance, although Catriona hints he has some other, more monstrous form that is never revealed in the show.
• Love Dodecahedron:
  • Vanessa has shown interest in both Dorian and Ethan, and the latter has in turn slept with the former and Brona, who modeled in a raunchy photoshoot for Dorian (which ended in sex). Vanessa also had sex with a demonic entity in the form of Sir Malcolm, so it's possible there's some Unresolved Sexual Tension between them as well. Vanessa and Dorian have sex in episode six.
    • Season Two continues this with Ethan and Vanessa growing closer, Victor developing sexual feelings for Brona and fondling her dead body as well as romantic feelings for her undead self Lily, Hecate being tasked with seducing Ethan, and Malcolm beginning a relationship with Evelyn, who is playing him in order to get to Vanessa. Dorian, meanwhile, looks to be striking up an interesting new relationship with Angelique, a transgender prostitute.
  • While most of the heroes have scattered by the beginning of Season 3, Vanessa has begun a romantic relationship with Dracula disguised as zoologist Dr. Alexander Sweet, and Dorian and Lily have also become a depraved pair. Hecate is now attempting to seduce Ethan in America.
• Mad Scientist:
  • The most famous in all literature, Mary Shelley's Victor Frankenstein.
  • Come season 3 and Dr Jekyll makes an appearance; while less physically and more mentally invasive than Victor's approach, his speciality is neurology, serums and injecting unwilling test subjects with suspicious substances. He also has a lab, though rather bigger than Victor's.
• Madness Makeover: Compare Vanessa in her normal look◊ to Vanessa in the first throes of her possession◊ and finally, Vanessa fully possessed◊.
• Magical Native American: Kaetenay is one, as he can bring on visions of the future and connect to other people's minds through using Apache ritual magic. Oh, and he's also a werewolf, being the one who turned Ethan in the first place.
• Male Frontal Nudity:
  • Proteus in "Night Work".
  • Angelique in "Verbis Diablo".
• Manipulative Bastard:
  • Sir Malcolm. He pressured Peter into having sex with prostitutes to suit Victorian ideas of masculinity, doesn't tell Vanessa about Lyle's interpretation of the prophecy until it's too late, and apparently wants Vanessa's demon to keep her on the brink of death until she contacts Mina's spirit.
  • Evelyn's manipulation of the people of Devon in "The Nightcomers" to rouse them against the Cut-Wife rates as this, though she takes a level in "Above the Vaulted Sky" when she drives Gladys Murray insane, sending her visions of her dead children rising from their graves, so that Gladys will kill herself and Evelyn can have Malcolm all to herself. Of course, her prior manipulations of Lyle and Malcolm were pretty big hints at what she could do.
  • Dracula, in the guise of the innocuous Dr. Alexander Sweet, fully seduces Vanessa to the dark. Even after she breaks up with him out of fear for his safety, she returns to him in "No Beast So Fierce" and practically confesses that she's in love with him before they consummate their relationship on the museum floor. Only a few days later, Vanessa surrenders to Dracula and becomes his queen, the Mother of Evil. He is the only villain in the series to actually win, albeit for a short period of time.
• Marionette Motion: The vampires seem to move like this, especially the one Ethan gives a failed Boom, Headshot! to.
• Massive Multiplayer Crossover: The show includes characters from Dracula, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Frankenstein and The Picture of Dorian Gray, as well as archetypes from Victorian horror literature.
• Mauve Shirt: Two apparently-significant, meaningful, well-developed characters get the abrupt dispatch in season 1, in both cases at the hands of Caliban.
• Meaningful Background Event:
  • The Vomiting Cop from the Spitalfields Murders.
  • Proteus disappearing from the operating table behind Victor. Subverted twice beforehand.
  • Sir Malcolm walking right past his possibly-vampiric daughter Mina in the hallway in "Night Work".
  • The cloaked figure that may have been spying on Victor, who appears in both "Night Work" and "Seance", was very likely Caliban.
• Meaningful Echo:
  • Three in "Closer than Sisters":
    • "Something spoke. I listened." ^Explanation When Vanessa first spies on her mother and Malcolm having sex in the hedge maze, it's also the first time she feels the demonic presence that will later possess her. Later, when she's nearly-catatonic after the trepanation and institutionalization, she is visited by the same demon, in the form of Sir Malcolm. She murmurs that something spoke to her all those years ago, and the demon points out that yes, he spoke, but she made the choice to listen.
    • "You have to name a thing to bring it to life." ^Explanation While working in the taxidermy room with Peter and Mina, young Vanessa claims this is why she names all the animals she stuffs. Later, when she and Captain Branson are in the room late at night, she repeats this to him. Finally, when Vanessa is visited by the demon in Sir Malcolm's form, she asks him if she should name him. He answers "only if you want me to live", reminding her of those words.
    • "The mirrors behind the glass eyes." ^Explanation In the scene where Vanessa lures a drunken Captain Branson to the taxidermy room, she tells him she put mirrors behind the hawk's eyes so it wouldn't look dull like the other animals. She seductively tells him she would do this for the entire world, which is when he overpowers her and they begin having sex on the table, to be discovered by Mina. When the demon appears in Sir Malcolm's form, he begins to seduce her by reminding her she's always been drawn to dark things, "the mirrors behind the glass eyes".
  • In "Memento Mori", Evelyn confesses to Malcolm that she has become cold and lonely in her immortality, and asks him to "walk with [her]", i.e. stay with her forever. In "And They Were Enemies", Vanessa makes the same plea to Ethan to "walk with [her]", i.e. stop running from his past.
  • Both Sembene and Kaetenay admonish Sir Malcolm to "Know who you are."
  • Malcolm's assertion to Inspector Galway in "Seance" in regards to the Spitalfields murders, "You need to stop hunting for a man and start hunting for a beast", is recalled by Inspector Rusk in "Memento Mori" as proof that Malcolm knows Ethan is something supernatural and committed the murders.
  • "Good and Evil Braided Be" has Vanessa using her powers to read Doctor Seward, asking her "shall we walk together?", which was Malcolm's offer to her in "Closer Than Sisters" when Vanessa first came to live with him at Grandage Place.
    • Hecate offers a callback to Malcolm and Vanessa in "Closer than Sisters" as well, discussing violence that "stretches corpses from here to the horizon".
  • In "No Beast So Fierce," Victor shares an exchange with Lily quite like the one Malcolm shares with Gladys in "Fresh Hell":
    Malcolm/Victor: We were happy, once.
    Gladys/Lily: No, you were happy, once.
  • Dr. Alexander Sweet tells Vanessa that he "[loves her] for who [she] is, not who the world wants [her] to be" in "No Beast So Fierce." Coincidentally (or not) enough, Dracula says the same thing to Vanessa in "A Blade of Grass."
  • Dracula and Vanessa's conversation in "Ebb Tide" calls back to Vanessa's first conversation with Dr. Sweet in "The Day Tennyson Died" when he confesses his love for "all the broken and shunned creatures."
    Dracula: The broken things.
    Vanessa: ...The unloved.
    • Vanessa's first meeting with Dr. Sweet in turn recalls "Above the Vaulted Sky", in which Caliban/John Clare talks with Vanessa about sharing his name with the dead poet John Clare.
    John Clare: I've always been moved by John Clare's story. By all accounts he was only five feet tall, so... considered freakish. Perhaps due to this, he felt a singular affinity with... the outcasts and the unloved... the ugly animals... the broken things.
• Meaningful Name:
  • 'Miss Ives' can be read as 'missives', an archaic term for messages. Vanessa is possessed, and frequently conveys prophecies and missives from another world.
  • Brona lampshades hers — it's Irish for “sadness”. Her new name after her resurrection, Lily, also counts as one.
  • Madame Kali has a particularly interesting name for a spiritualist; Kali is a Hindu goddess associated with destruction and change. Her given name, Evelyn, is of French origin, ironically meaning "life" or "beauty", but when you consider what her particular gift from her Master was...
    • Considering that she named her daughter Hecate Aphrodite, "Kali" could also come from Greek "kalos", meaning "beautiful". ^note  "kali" is one possible form of this adjective, as in "Kalipygia", a title given to Aphrodite
  • Proteus is, of course, the name of one of the titular "Two Gentlemen of Verona" (the more cowardly and naive one, it should be noted), but it is also the name of a sea-god of Greek mythology, fitting for a former man of the sea.
  • The Creature, Frankenstein's first creation is named Caliban by the theatre director who takes him in — a character who, in The Tempest, is depicted as a misshapen monster.
  • Evelyn's daughter Hecate is, of course, a witch.
  • The Cut-Wife meets the same fate as her namesake.
  • Inspector Rusk's name is very similar to that of George Aken Lusk, head of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee. The Real Life Lusk led a neighborhood-watch group during Jack the Ripper's murder spree; it was to him that the infamous "From hell" letter was addressed.
  • Dracula means "son of the dragon" or "son of the devil." Ironically, his fake name — Dr. Alexander Sweet — is the exact opposite of his true personality.
  • Kaetenay may be more of a badass than we even know. There was a historical Kaetenay who served as one of Geronimo's lieutenants.
• Meat Puppet: Vanessa is one for all manner of ghosts and demons.
• Medical Horror: The asylum scenes in "Closer than Sisters", which are Truth in Television.
• Medicate the Medium: The flashbacks in "Closer Than Sisters" show Vanessa being "treated" with "hydrotherapy," hypothermia, and surgery (possibly a lobotomy, but more likely "just" a trepanation, given that her personality and talents don't appear to change).
• Mentor Occupational Hazard:
  • Victor's mentor Van Helsing is murdered by the Creature in a temper tantrum because Victor isn't paying attention to him. Seconds after saying that he is old and it does not matter whether he dies, he dies.
  • Vanessa's mentor, the Cut-Wife, is burnt alive by a mob incited by her sister, Evelyn. Funnily enough, she tells Vanessa that she is old and the danger that Vanessa brings is just 'spice' to an old woman's last days. Chronologically, a few weeks or months later, she dies. It's a thing with this show: mentors keep dying, except the horrid ones, like Malcolm.
• Mercy Kill:
  • Arguably the case when Victor smothers Brona, but since he lies about it and then takes the body to make the Creature's Bride, it's more morally ambiguous.
    • Just to add an extra bit of spice, if he hadn't, Victor and Brona would have presumably both been on the premises when night fell and Ethan perpetrated the Mariner's Inn Massacre — his Wolf-Man form can certainly climb stairs.
  • While the ship carrying him to the North Pole is stranded on frozen wasteland, Caliban snaps the neck of a young boy who is slowly dying from the cold.
• Milking the Giant Cow: Vincent, especially when on stage.
• Minimalist Cast:
  • "Possession" features only the five main actors (Eva Green, Timothy Dalton, Josh Hartnett, Harry Treadaway, and Danny Sapani), with a silent cameo from Rory Kinnear's Creature and a priest.
  • "The Nightcomers" only utilizes Eva Green, Josh Hartnett, Patti LuPone and Helen McCrory, with no other main cast members.
  • "A Blade of Grass" takes place entirely in Vanessa's mind, using only Green, LuPone, and Kinnear.
• Monochrome Casting: Downplayed. In seasons one and two, the only non-white main character is Sembene, and he barely talks. This improves somewhat in season three, where there are not one but two non-white characters in the main cast, namely Kaetenay and Henry Jekyll. All other characters of color in the show are either background extras or play extremely minor roles. It is justified, however, by the show largely being set in elite parts of Victorian English society, which would realistically be about 100% white.
• Monster Mash: Played wonderfully straight. Penny Dreadful's demimonde is a shadowy world populated with vampires, witches, demons and even a werewolf; among the featured cast are Dr Frankenstein and his Creature, Dr Jekyll, Dorian Gray... and in season 3, Dracula himself.
• Mood Whiplash:
  • In one of the series' genuinely touching moments, Proteus returns with Frankenstein to the doctor's flat after a successful venture out into the city, where he shows great aptitude for interacting with others and even remembers flashes from his life before he died. By the time he gets home, he's genuinely overjoyed at the prospect of making friends. And then Frankenstein's first creation emerges from a dark stairwell immediately behind Proteus, murders him by punching straight through him, then ripping him in half, and stands over his horrified creator with a cold Death Glare.
  • The Creature is great at this, as he also dispatches Van Helsing with a snapped neck after the kindly professor bonds with Victor and tells him that he wishes him a long life.
  • In "Above the Vaulted Sky", the various scenes of Dorian/Angelique and Evelyn/Malcolm having sex, as well as Ethan/Vanessa's intense flirtation, are horrifying when cut with the scenes of Gladys Murray being haunted by visions of her dead children, then slitting her own throat.
• More than Mind Control: Vanessa's demons may use brute force at times, but they can also seduce people by simply speaking truth, lies, or poetry by Keats.
• Mr. Fanservice: While other attractive men also appear shirtless or nude in the series, Dorian spends a disproportionate amount of his time naked — unsurprising, given his source material.
• Mugging the Monster: The Putney family tries to imprison the Creature as a circus freak, unaware that he's superhumanly strong and can rip steel bars out of walls with barely any effort. It ends badly for them.
• Mythology Gag:
  • Victor suggests "Adam," Mary Shelley's name for Frankenstein's Creature, as a possible name for Proteus. He quickly dismisses the idea, though.
  • When first introduced, Victor asks Ethan what he knows of galvanism, the process of using electricity to reanimate flesh. In Shelley's novel, galvanism is the one hint to the commonly held belief that the Creature was created through lightning. It also points to the novel's early 19th-century setting; by 1891, the idea of galvanism would be roughly 100 years old, hardly cutting-edge science.
  • Dorian Grey is introduced gazing at a portrait gallery.
  • Sembene wields a kukri knife, Jonathan Harker's weapon of choice in Dracula. Harker himself is namedropped earlier in the fourth episode as Mina's husband.
  • Frankenstein is a fan of Romantic literature and poetry, referencing the era Frankenstein the novel was set in.
  • The Creature references Percy Bysshe Shelley's poetry while berating Frankenstein. Shelley, of course, was married to Frankenstein's author Mary Shelley. Victor later quotes a line of Shelley's "Adonais" to Van Helsing, also serving as a Title Drop for the episode it takes place in: "No more let Life divide what Death can join together".
  • The little girl outside the church that Vanessa speaks to in "Demimonde" is named "Lucy", as in Lucy Westenra, Dracula's victim in the original Bram Stoker novel.
  • Professor Abraham Van Helsing shows up later as the hematologist Sir Malcolm contracts to analyze Fenton's blood and develop a cure. He claims to know vampirism "intimately".
  • Flashbacks show that the Creature, unlike Proteus, was "born" covered in slime on a bloody table. In Shelley's novel, the details of how the Creature was born are not shared, except that it emerged in a similar state.
  • "Closer Than Sisters" recounts Vanessa's backstory in the form of a letter to Mina Harker. Dracula itself is comprised of dozens of letters and journal entries, most of them written and/or transcribed by Mina Harker.
  • Vanessa's mother died of shock upon finding the possessed Vanessa having sex with an unseen demonic presence. In Dracula, Lucy Westenra's mother dies the same way when a wolf crashes through the window as part of Dracula's attack.
  • In "Possession", the Creature quotes from Milton's Paradise Lost: "Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay to mould me Man?" This was the epigraph to Mary Shelley's original novel.
  • Frankenstein, when showing his laboratory to Jekyll, describes it as "The House of Pain", which is also the name of the laboratory where HG Wells' Doctor Moreau turned animals into freakish experiments.
  • The orderly reads the poem "My Shadow" to Vanessa in the asylum. Its author, Robert Louis Stevenson, was also the author of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
  • Ethan is quite literally An American Werewolf in London. Also, his real name is revealed to be Ethan Lawrence Talbot, as in Larry Talbot from The Wolf Man (1941).
• Neck Snap: How the Creature kills Van Helsing and Dorian kills Justine.
• Nerves of Steel: Neither vampires nor seances nor Satan chasing her shall distract Vanessa from saving Mina.
  • To highlight how dangerous the coven of witches are in season two, they scare the hell out of Vanessa.
• Nightmare Fetishist:
  • Victor Frankenstein. When given the opportunity to dissect a vampire, he's downright excited about it. Not to mention that he feels up a corpse's breasts in "Fresh Hell."
  • Dorian Gray is turned on by tuberculosis. We should expect no less.
  • Vanessa really wants to do the right thing, but the devil's promise to make her the Mother of Evil and destroy the world turns her on anyway.
  • Evelyn Poole is very excited about skulls, blood, scarification, blood baths, child murder, and BDSM.
  • Any other person, were they let in on Victor's little hobby of resurrecting the dead, would be varying levels of shocked, appalled and terrified. Jekyll's reaction in "The Day Tennyson Died" is basically "So it worked? Sweet," although he did have the advantage of knowing about Victor's ambitions for years beforehand.
• Nightmare Fuel Station Attendant: Vampires, demonic possession, hideously bloody murders, ghosts — very little seems to rattle Vanessa. Even Sir Malcolm loses his cool when his missing and turned vampiric daughter Mina shows up, but not Vanessa.
• Noble Savage: Sembene seems to be one at first, but he turns out to be a subversion when it is revealed that he was given his scars as a punishment for being a slave trader. Kaetenay appears like a subversion from the first moment, and is proven to be as brutal and vengeful as Jared Talbot.
• Non-Action Guy: Victor starts out as the Non-Action Guy and slowly develops into a Badass Bookworm. His place is then taken up by Lyle, who is great when you need ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics translated, but not so much when your home is being attacked by witches.
  • Season 3's Dr. Alexander Sweet markets himself as one, remarking that he doesn't go on zoological expeditions because he isn't built for it. Given the fact that he's actually Dracula, this is utter bullshit.
• Not Distracted by the Sexy: When Victor shows up to re-examine the vampire body, Sir Malcolm orders Vanessa to unbutton the top of her dress to expose more of her neck. It doesn't really work on Victor.
• Not His Sled: [[spoiler:Dr. Jekyll never takes his medicine to unleash his darker side. Instead, he becomes

Lord Hyde by more mundanely inheriting the title from his late father]].

• Not So Stoic: After Vanessa tells her her life story, Dr. Seward calmly stops recording, gets up, and gets a cigarette. After advising Vanessa to do something that will make her happy, she watches Vanessa leave before putting a hand over her mouth and tearing up, clearly affected by what she's heard.
• Nothing Is Scarier: Utilized in “Night Work” with the little girl finding out who or what has taken her mother — all we see is an otherwise calm house and the girl screaming.
  • Used once again in "The Day Tennyson Died" when Renfield is captured by vampires while fucking a hooker; the vampires swarm around him, they drop simultaneously and scurry away at the sound of a swoop, and Renfield gapes in horror at the deep voice and unseen face of Dracula.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: Dorian comments that Ethan would pretend not to know Wagner's work if Dorian played it and goes on to accuse him of this trope. It continues in season two, where Ethan keeps Inspector Rusk at bay by pretending to be a simple American actor on holiday in London.
  Dorian: "You play your part to perfection, Mister Chandler. Rude, mechanical. Rugged Westerner. But this is not who you are."
• Of Corsets Sexy: Brona has a simple cotton and whalebone one in "Seance". Vanessa wears a gorgeous black one in "What Death Can Join Together". Evelyn wears them during sex in "The Nightcomers" and "Above the Vaulted Sky". Lily finds hers hard to breathe in and is given permission to take it off in "Evil Spirits in Heavenly Places", but wears one to the ball in "Glorious Horrors".
• Oh, Crap!:
  • Malcolm's reaction shots to Vanessa's possession in both "Seance" and "What Death Can Join Together."
  • Ethan's response to Malcolm's assertion that Vanessa has been "possessed by the devil" in "Possession."
  • The crowner really has to go to Ethan's reaction shot to Vanessa speaking Verbis Diablo to frighten off the witches in "Fresh Hell".
  • Vanessa's reaction when Cat tells her of legends of Dracula dwelling in the "House of Night Creatures", which is the (rather unsubtle) name of Dr. Sweet's newest exhibit at the zoological museum.
• Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping:
  • Dorian Gray has a bit of a hard time hiding Reeve Carney's American accent.
  • Brona Croft is an Irish immigrant. While Billie Piper's Irish brogue is pretty good, if a bit caricatured, sometimes her RP accent slips out. It goes the opposite way in season 2 after she's resurrected, but this time on purpose, as Lily Frankenstein speaks with Piper's native RP accent, but lapses briefly into Brona's Irish accent during her heated "The Reason You Suck" Speech to John Clare.
• Older Than They Look:
  • Dorian Grey. His statements concerning his life experiences imply that he's much older than his youthful appearance suggests. The character he's based on shares this trait.
  • Evelyn Poole. Apparently Blood Baths and Deals With the Devil can keep you young and beautiful for over 200 years.
    • On the same note, the Cut-Wife knew Oliver Cromwell.
  • Dracula is thousands of years old in his physical form. Including the time he spent as an angel, he's even older.
• Ominous Crack: In a supernatural variant, nearby mirrors tend to crack whenever a spell or possessing force clashes with another or is stymied.
• Ominous Latin Chanting: During both Vanessa's sex scene with Dorian Gray and her possession in the following episode.
  • "Fresh Hell" introduces some Ominous Diabolic Latin Chanting, with the Verbis Diablo language.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Sembene doesn't often lose his composure, but when he does, it never means anything good.
• Opium Den: Sir Malcolm and Vanessa track the vampires to the basement of one.
• Our Demons Are Different: They can possess a willing host (i.e. Vanessa) and work magic of sorts through her, as well as being able to appear in human form and have incubus-like sex with their target, although they are invisible to anyone who isn't being possessed in this state.
• Our Vampires Are Different:
  • The more powerful vampires' hide consists of an exoskeleton of sorts, with skin underneath that's covered in Egyptian hieroglyphics which possibly translate as "the blood curse". They are always seen naked. These vampires apparently lead lesser vampires, who are mostly human but must consume meat and blood. If the leader dies, its lesser vampires flee. Vampires can be killed with simple bullets, knives, and other weapons. There exists at least one Master Vampire that holds dominion over the leader and lesser vampires, who is revealed in "Memento Mori" to be a Fallen Angel and brother to Lucifer himself.
  • The vampires are also more bestial than vampires from other fiction. With the exception of their progenitor Dracula, master vampires have mentally degenerated to little more than feral animals with limited intelligence who cannot speak. That, along with their physical changes, prevents them from passing as humans. Lesser vampires or familiars are hardly better, since their combination of pale skin and animal instincts makes them stand out and limits their ability to pass as human.
• Our Werewolves Are Different: The werewolves in the series seem to be like the 1941 film The Wolf Man, and are implied to be there to serve God's purpose as Vanessa's protector against Lucifer and Dracula.
• Overdrawn at the Blood Bank:
  • In "Night Work", the walls and floor of the basement of the opium den are covered in blood and ripped-apart bodies. Notably, none of our heroes' clothes get dirty.
  • Happens onstage in "What Death Can Join Together" when the Grand Guignol's stage rats overdo it on the blood pump.
  • Vanessa's hallucination at Dorian's ball in "Glorious Horrors" is of the ceiling suddenly starting to rain blood, drenching the string quartet, the guests, and her in blood.

P-S

• Parental Substitute:
  • There are some oddly familial dynamics going on in "Demimonde", with Malcolm acting as a parental figure for Ethan and Victor. After Malcolm invites Ethan to Africa with him, Victor gets jealous, stammering that he wants to be valued and trusted. Malcolm tells him his deceased son Peter was very much like Victor.
  Malcolm: Mr. Chandler is nothing to me. He is a finger on a trigger. You are not.
  • Ethan as Malcolm's son gets more traction in "The Day Tennyson Died", where Kaetenay recruits Malcolm to help him save Ethan because "our son needs us".
  • Malcolm was one for Vanessa when she was a child. She certainly seems closer and more affectionate toward Malcolm (and the rest of the Murray family) than to her own mother and father.
• Phlebotinum Rebel: Frankenstein's Creature.
• Pinkerton Detective: Two are sent after Ethan by his father.
• Plot Threads: The series has a lot of these. To wit:
  • Vanessa and Malcolm are searching for a) Mina and b) a cure for vampirism.
  • Vanessa also appears to be the host vessel for the ancient Egyptian goddess Amunet, who is searching for her mate Amun Ra with potentially world-shattering consequences, while at the same time also being possessed by something else which claims to be "much older" than Amunet.
  • Victor makes (and copes with) his various creations, and is being forced to make a bride for his original Creature.
  • Dorian Gray develops an interest in both Vanessa and Ethan, and has a very large, very mysterious portrait in his home.
  • Ethan and Brona form a relationship while having to cope with the fact that she's dying.
  • Ethan's influential father seeks to persuade or force him to return to the States, where he's a suspect in an unknown number of bloody crimes.
  • On top of everything else, someone or something is going around London by night, messily murdering defenseless people. The season 1 finale makes it a virtual certainty that it's Ethan, who is a Wolf Man, and in season two, Scotland Yard is put on the trail of the killings...
• Possession Levitation: After a date night with Dorian Gray, Vanessa returns home possessed by a demon. Malcolm discovers her in the salon levitating and spinning in the air with her head turned upward.
• Powered by a Forsaken Child: Evelyn and Hecate's strange voodoo-like dolls appear to run on this; constructing one requires the heart from a baby.
• The Power of Lust: Lucifer relies on the Power of Lust and on other superficial motivators to get what he wants. His power over Vanessa becomes overwhelming whenever she has sex, for example. As he doesn't understand Vanessa and her desires, he ultimately fails in wooing her to be evil. Dracula, on the other hand, approaches her with apparently genuine affection and does woo her to be evil.
• Pragmatic Adaptation:
  • Victor Frankenstein, a Swiss character from a story set in the 1790s, is reimagined as an Englishman in 1891. This does have precedent in previous adaptations, though, and it does keep him as a young man as in Shelley's book.
  • Professor Van Helsing is a Dutch doctor in Dracula, but he's changed to a native Englander for the show to avoid a distracting accent.
• Pre-Mortem One-Liner: Vanessa to the devil:
  Beloved, know your master.
• Pretty Boy: Dorian Gray. Lampshaded when possessed!Vanessa calls him "the beautiful boy."
• Primal Scene: Two in "Closer than Sisters". First, Vanessa catches her mother having sex with Sir Malcolm, and then years later, Mina catches Vanessa having sex with Mina's fiance.
• Promoted to Opening Titles: Helen McCrory (Evelyn Poole) and Simon Russell Beale (Ferdinand Lyle) get their names in the opening credits in the second season. Patti LuPone gets into the opening credits in the third season, but playing a different character to her guest role in the second.
• Prophet Eyes: Vanessa has them when she's having possessed!sex with the demon she's summoned. The sight of them and what is happening causes her mother to die of shock.
• Pseudo-Romantic Friendship: Vanessa and Mina were quite close in their youth. Flashbacks in the season one episode Closer Than Sisters show them sharing a bed and exchanging kisses.
• Psychic Link: One appears to exist between the master vampires and their minions.
• Psychic Powers: Vanessa, who can read tarot, channel spirits, and seems to have a bit of precognition. How much is her and how much is the entity possessing her is up for debate, though "The Nightcomers" insinuates that while Vanessa was born with her powers, one can learn these skills.
• Psychic-Assisted Suicide: Evelyn drives Gladys Murray to kill herself by driving her mad, sending her voodoo-doll-assisted pain and visions of her dead children rising from their graves. She then tries to do the same to both Malcolm and Victor in the season finale, but is defeated before they die.
• "Psycho" Strings: Used nigh-constantly in the climax of "And Hell Itself My Only Foe", including an actual snippet of the famous Psycho Scare Chord when Victor hallucinates all three of his creatures visiting him.
• Public Domain Canon Welding: The series weaves together iconic characters and plots from Dracula, Frankenstein, Paradise Lost, The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and The Wolf Man (1941) (to name just the most prominent ones) into a standalone story centered on an original character, the spirit medium Vanessa Ives.
• Public Domain Character: About half the cast are characters from classic Victorian gothic literature, including:
  • Dorian Gray, from Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray.
  • Victor Frankenstein and his Creature, from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
  • Dr. Jekyll, from Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
  • Mina Murray, Dr. Seward, Renfield, and Van Helsing from Bram Stoker's Dracula, and, in Season 3, Dracula himself. Jonathan Harker is mentioned by name, but never appears in the show. He appears in the prequel comic, however.
  • Justine, from the novel by the same name by the Marquis de Sade.
• Pyrrhic Victory: Every major victory earned by the heroes comes out looking like one of these.
  • In season 1, the heroes find the major vampire nest in London, killing its inhabitants and severing the Master's leverage over Vanessa and Sir Malcolm by killing the treacherous Mina... but Sir Malcolm is now responsible for the deaths of both of his children, meaning his family line is now destined to expire into nothingness. And the demon that possessed Vanessa, whilst weakened, is still implied to exist somewhere within her.
  • In season 2, the heroes manage to rescue Sir Malcolm from Evelyn Poole and her coven, and Vanessa staves off Satan himself, but Sembene is killed by Ethan in his werewolf form. A heartbroken Sir Malcolm leaves London to bury Sembene back in Africa, a guilt-ridden Ethan turns himself in to Inspector Rusk at Scotland Yard, breaking Vanessa's heart in the process, and Vanessa herself is left alone at Grandage Place to suffer onwards in fear and doubt.
  • In season 3, the apocalypse is averted. While Dracula is not killed, his hold over the world is defeated, and Ethan, Malcolm, Victor, Catriona, and Seward survive. Vanessa, unfortunately, does not, persuading Ethan to kill her in order to defeat Dracula. Both sources of evil (Dracula and Lucifer), as well as their disciples, are left to wait until the reincarnation of Amunet, and then the whole cycle will begin again.
• Rage Against the Heavens: Brona despises God for inflicting her with an abusive fiancé, an unsupportive family, unemployment, and a terminal disease.
  • Dracula, in the guise of Dr. Sweet, indirectly claims that God has "cursed" him to walk the earth, feed on human blood, and hide in the shadows for all eternity.
• Rapid Aging: Evelyn becomes subject to this after Vanessa defeats the devil.
• Really Gets Around: While Dorian's probably the reigning king of this trope, Vanessa, Malcolm, Ethan, and Brona all have or have had sex with someone they had just met.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Ethan and Victor deliver this to one another in "Demimonde," then jointly serve it up to Malcolm in "Possession", although they'll probably never top the epic versions offered by possessed!Vanessa, with, again, the worst directed at Malcolm.
  • Even Gladys Murray gets in on telling Malcolm off in "Fresh Hell", standing in front of Mina's and Peter's graves and telling him they have "no more children for you to save. Or kill." and informing him their separation stands.
  • Lily gives a blistering one to Caliban before shifting gears and seducing him.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: The vampires have solid red eyes.
• Redhead In Green: Brona has red hair and usually wears green, possibly to emphasize her Irishness.
• Religious Horror: "Possession" is one of the darkest episodes of the series, showing a demonically possessed Vanessa manifesting telekinesis, blood magic, and requiring an exorcism from Ethan to be defeated. "Fresh Hell" gives us the witches, servants of Lucifer, and their leader Evelyn Poole, who uses blood magic and Satan worship to attack our heroes.
• The Renfield:
  • Fenton at least has the attitude and traits, and is not "entirely preternatural," according to Victor.
  • We get the actual Renfield, Dr. Seward's secretary instead of her patient in this iteration, in season 3, and he encounters Dracula himself.
• Replacement Goldfish: Victor becomes one for Sir Malcolm, on account of how much he resembles Malcolm's late son, Peter.
• The Reveal:
  • Malcolm is Sir Malcolm Murray, father of Mina Murray from Dracula.
  • There is more than one "leader" vampire. The Murray reveal means that it's likely Dracula.
  • Proteus is not the first Creature Frankenstein has created.
  • The season 1 finale reveals that Ethan is a werewolf which, together with the glimpses of mutilation-victims during his flashback montage from "Demimonde," confirms that he was responsible for the dismemberment killings in episodes 1 and 2.
  • "Memento Mori" has several:
    • Lily remembers her former life as Brona, knows exactly what she is now, and is far more ambitious and spiteful in her villainy than Caliban.
    • The Verbis Diablo fragments reveal that both Lucifer and the vampire Master are fallen angels, estranged brothers competing to possess the "Mother of Evil", i.e. Vanessa.
    • Dorian Gray's portrait is finally shown, and it's bound by chains, possibly because it can move.
  • Dr. Alexander Sweet, the kind and somewhat eccentric zoologist in whom Vanessa has taken romantic interest, is actually Dracula.
  • Dracula is "the Master" referred to by the vampires, and he's also Lucifer's brother.
• Reverse Whodunnit: Especially in seasons 2 and 3. In both seasons, the main villain reveals itself to the audience long before the heroes know who it is. In fact, the heroes usually start out on good terms with the villain in disguise, who slowly seduces them. The suspense for the audience is in waiting to see how and when the heroes will catch on to the villain's disguise and plan.
• Right Through His Pants: Played straight by Ethan and the groupie in "Night Work," Malcolm and Claire in "Closer Than Sisters," Vanessa and Branson in "Closer Than Sisters," Malcolm and Evelyn and Victor and Lily in "Above the Vaulted Sky," and Vanessa and Dracula in "No Beast So Fierce." Averted by most of Dorian's sex scenes, particularly the ones with Vanessa in "What Death Can Join Together" and with Angelique in "Above the Vaulted Sky." Also averted by Ethan and Hecate in "This World Is Our Hell."
• Ripped from the Headlines: Invoked by Oskar Putney, the wax museum's operator, who must have started crafting a scene based on Ethan's rampage at the riverside inn within hours of the story breaking in the newspapers.
• Rousing Speech: Though it's not exactly intended to be one so much as a manifesto of sorts, Victor gives one to Sir Malcolm at the Explorer’s Club, attempting to explain his devotion to scientific discovery, rather than exploring new lands:
  There is only one worthy goal for scientific exploration: piercing the tissue that separates life from death. Everything else, from the deep bottom of the sea to the top of the highest mountain on the farthest planet, is insignificant. Life and death, Sir Malcolm. The flicker that separates one from the other, fast as a bat’s wing, more beautiful than any sonnet. That is my river. That is my mountain. There I will plant my flag.
• Rugged Scar: Sembene's scars mark him as a badass, but also as a slave trader.
• Sadistic Choice: Malcolm is given one in "Grand Guignol" — Mina has taken Vanessa hostage, revealing that she has manipulated them both for her "Master's" purposes. Either he can shoot Vanessa and attempt to "cure" Mina, or he can save Vanessa from Mina. Malcolm has promised Vanessa a number of times that he intends to sacrifice her if it means getting Mina back, but realizing that Mina has betrayed them both and Vanessa will surely be used by the Master to breed a new race of vampires, Malcolm shoots and kills Mina.
• Safe, Sane, and Consensual: While Dorian is quite creepy, he does make sure that Brona consents to their sexual encounter, and, given his Healing Factor, his promiscuity and masochism are a lot safer and saner than would otherwise be the case.
• Satan: The thing that seems to be possessing Vanessa has long claimed to be the Fallen Angel himself. The witches worship him and are doing his bidding in season two.
• Savage Wolves: There's a pack of them loose at the London Zoo.
• Screaming Woman: Eva Green’s and Helen McCrory’s screams in "Seance" could strip the paint off walls.
• Seen It All: Dorian Gray. It's reached the point where orgies make him kick furniture from boredom.
• Second Episode Introduction: Brona Croft, Dorian Gray, and the Creature are introduced in the second episode.
• Sex Montage: At the end of "Above the Vaulted Sky", with three different couples doing the dirty and one more pining at each other.
• Sexy Discretion Shot: Between Ethan and Dorian.
• Sex Signals Death: A twist, as the person who dies when Vanessa has sex with a demon is her mother, who dies of shock from seeing it.
• Sherlock Scan:
  • Vanessa pulls one on Ethan in "Night Work".
  Expensive watch, but threadbare jacket — you're sentimental about the money you used to have. Your eye is steady, but your left hand tremors, that's the drink, so you keep it below the table hoping I won't notice. You have a contusion healing on your other hand, the result of a recent brawl with a jealous husband, no doubt. Your boots are good quality leather, but have been re-soled more than once. I see a man who's been accustomed to wealth, but has given himself to excess and the unbridled pleasures of youth. A man much more complicated than he likes to appear.
  • Dorian makes a pretty good one of Vanessa herself in "Seance".
  You do not belong here. Even less than I. You are not frivolous. Your eye is careful and appraising. This is not a careful room, although there is much to appraise. That can divert you for only so long. You do not like it here. You are closed to it. Yet... you're the only woman in this house not wearing gloves. Your hands want to touch, but your head wants to appraise. Your heart is torn between the two. You were skeptical because you thought... this was going to be a wasted evening, but now you're not so sure.
  • Dr. Seward reads Vanessa incredibly well by the same token in "The Day Tennyson Died".
  I already know what's wrong with you. You're isolated. You're unhappy. You think you're the cause of this unhappiness, and are unworthy of affection, so you have few friends. Recently you lost something you think very important — your lover, your faith, your family — or all three. You blame yourself for this, so it makes you neurotic and you don't sleep and don't eat — not anything healthy, anyway. You used to take care of your appearance, but you've lost interest in that, so you avoid mirrors. Sunlight bothers you, so you avoid that too, about which you're guilty because you think it's unhealthy and even immoral not to like the sun. You're not a woman of convention, or you wouldn't be here, but you like to pretend you are so that people don't notice you. But you sometimes like that as well, and can dress to draw the eye. Then, you think the men who look at you are fools or worse to be taken in by such an obvious outward show. So instead, you're drawn to dark, complicated, impossible men, assuring your own unhappiness and isolation because, after all, you're happiest alone. But not even then, because you can't stop thinking about what you lost, again for which you blame yourself. So the cycle goes on, the snake eating its own tail.
• Shoo Out the Clowns: As a sign of impending doom, Mr. Lyle is suddenly sent to Egypt in 3.06. It does save him from the apocalypse, though.
• Shoot the Hostage Taker: What Malcolm does in "Grand Guignol", astonishingly enough, considering said hostage taker is his daughter Mina, revealing herself as The Dragon and intending to kidnap Vanessa.
• Shout-Out:
  • An unmoving Vanessa in the crowd at Ethan’s shooting exhibition is one to Strangers on a Train.
  • An advertisement drops the name of Doctor Jekyll. He shows up in season three. Additionally, Evelyn's surname of "Poole" belongs to Doctor Jekyll's manservant in the novel, although when Jekyll shows up it seems they're completely unconnected — he doesn't even have a manservant at all.
  • Vanessa’s Sherlock Scan of Ethan is nearly note-for-note the same cool assessment Eva Green as Vesper Lynd gave to James Bond in Casino Royale (2006).
  • The appearance of the leader vampire, with its lithe body, clawed fingers, and long middle teeth, seems to invoke Count Orlok.
  • The demonic entity possessing Vanessa, appearing in the guise of Sir Malcolm, quotes John Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale".
  • While explaining vampires to Doctor Frankenstein, Van Helsing shows him a copy of Varney the Vampire, an actual penny dreadful.
  • The resurrected Brona, who's betrothed to Frankenstein's Creature, is given the name Lily. Fitting, since Lily has the Bride's iconic white-streaked hair.
  • The Cut-Wife of Ballantree Moor, a very powerful white witch, quotes another famous witch: "By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes."
  • Inspector Bartholomew Rusk, the Sympathetic Inspector Antagonist, has a wooden arm. This is inspired by Inspector Krogh in Son of Frankenstein, the third of the Universal Frankenstein films, though thanks to Parody Displacement the concept may be more familiar to modern viewers via the parody Young Frankenstein (via Inspector Kemp). The main difference is that Rusk lost his arm in the Transvaal, not to a monster.
  • Ethan's real full name is Ethan Lawrence Talbot, referring to the iconic Universal Horror werewolf Lawrence Talbot.
  • In the Season 2 finale, the Creature is seen on a boat in an arctic locale — a clear allusion to Frankenstein, which is framed by a journey to the North Pole.
  • Malcolm paraphrases Alexander the Great (a quote attributed to Plutarch, but also from Die Hard) in "The Day Tennyson Died", having "no new worlds to conquer".
  • Lily quotes Louis St. Just to Justine and Dorian: "Liberty is a bitch who must be bedded on a mattress of corpses."
• Shown Their Work: Much of the show is very faithful to the time period it depicts and the stories it’s referencing.
  • The carrion beetles cleaning a skull in Mr. Lyle’s office is an actual technique utilized to clean bones by many museums.
  • Throughout the series, adult Vanessa is always dressed in black, dark blue or red, and purple — Victorian mourning and half-mourning colors. This is because her mother is dead, and her beloved friend Mina is presumed dead. This is referenced again in "Grand Guignol" when, after Malcolm kills Mina, both Malcolm and Vanessa are seen in traditional mourning clothing.
  • Yes, the acting in the Grand Guignol is rather hammy and over the top, but that was precisely how performances of this sort were staged back in the day. Apart from anything else, they needed to make sure the people sitting at the back of the theatre got their money's worth.
  • Vanessa's treatment in the asylum, while horrifying, is also completely accurate for how mental patients were treated in this period of history.
  • Several variants of Sembene's ritual scars appear in behind-the-scenes clips about the show's makeup effects, all of them culturally appropriate for a traditional Senegalese native of the era.
  • Some fans criticized the show for depicting Dracula as a Daywalking Vampire, but he is indeed a daywalker in the original novel. In addition, Dracula's human form matches that of his book counterpart almost exactly, with a lanky frame, dark hair, angular features, a mustache, and a beard.
    • However, this iteration of Dracula does have a reflection and a shadow, and he lacks the deathly pale complexion of his literary counterpart.
• Sir Not-Appearing-in-This-Trailer:
  • The Creature was kept out of most of the early promotional material and trailers, so as to ensure it was all the more shocking when he finally makes his entrance. He only got his own poster and trailer once the third episode had aired.
  • The same thing happened with Lily/Brona for season 2, presumably to keep her appearance a surprise, although she did show up for a frame or two in the trailers.
• Slasher Smile: Sir Malcolm's is pretty excellent, as it seems to be his only other expression during battle besides steely stoicism.
• Spiders Are Scary: Especially when hundreds of them start pouring out from behind the crucifix on Vanessa's wall, or thousands from her spread-out Tarot cards.
• Spoiler Opening: The credits sequence spoils a few things; for example: images of Ethan and wolves are juxtaposed, making it obvious before the show even has time to start that he's a werewolf.
• Spooky Séance: A major plot point in episode two. Initially, it seems that Madame Kali is going to use her potentially-genuine powers of mediumship to entertain the people at Mr. Lyle’s party, until Vanessa (along with Sir Malcolm and Dorian) are picked to sit at the table. Vanessa — or the demonic entity possessing Vanessa — don’t take kindly to the Egyptian goddess Kali calls up, and hijack the seance. Vanessa is also taken over by Peter Murray, who has a scathing condemnation of his father which involves his abandonment of him to go exploring in Africa, and his illicit sexual relationship with Vanessa's mother.
• Staking the Loved One:
  • What Van Helsing had to do to his beloved wife, Hannah.
  • Sir Malcolm shoots vampire-Mina when it becomes clear she's been willingly aiding the Master and will bite and infect Vanessa if he doesn't stop her.
• Stalker with a Crush:
  • The Creature to Maude.
  • Dracula to Vanessa.
• Staring Down Cthulhu:
  • Vanessa does this to a full-fledged vampire in the first episode.
  • Vanessa at Lucifer, albeit when he's in the form of a doll with her face.
  • Vanessa again at Dracula as she spits on him and holds a gun to his heart. She ultimately lowers the gun and surrenders to him, but it doesn't render the moment any less badass.
  • Sir Malcolm at Dracula after he brags about eating Mina's flesh. Malcolm even dares to fire a few shots at Dracula, though he dodges them all.
• The Starscream: Hecate to Evelyn. When her mother's plan fails and she loses Lucifer's protection, Hecate releases were-Ethan into the room to rip Evelyn's throat out.
• Starving Artist: Well, Starving Medical Assistant, and the Victorian version, but Victor Frankenstein’s got this in spades.
  Sir Malcolm: You have the soul of a poet, sir.
  Victor: And the bank account to match.
• Strolling Through the Chaos: Vanessa does this quite spectacularly in "Night Work" during the fight at the opium den, serene and focused while Ethan and Malcolm are battling for their lives against the vampires.
• Supernatural Gold Eyes: The Creature, Victor’s first creation, has them. Notably, Proteus does not.
• Surprisingly Sudden Death: Proteus and Van Helsing are both killed suddenly by Caliban.
• The Swarm: If you're seeing spiders, chances are whatever thing that is possessing Vanessa is near.
• Sword Cane: Sir Malcolm carries one.
• Sympathy for the Devil: Despite the horrible things Caliban has done, Victor regrets abandoning him and goes through with the plan to make him a bride, even though Caliban himself now believes that such an effort is "futile."

T-V

• Tall Tale: Ethan Chandler is the star of a traveling Wild West Show, so as expected, he spins some tall tales. He even gets called out on it. (His skill with a six-gun, however, is not exaggerated.)
  Vanessa Ives: You didn't tell the truth. By my reckoning, you were a boy when General Custer died, and 'tis well known there were no survivors.
  Ethan Chandler: What we call a tall tale, darlin'.
  Vanessa: Exceedingly tall.
  Ethan: Vice of my nation. We're storytellers.
• Tarot Motifs: Vanessa, as a fortuneteller, is adept at reading tarot. Notably, the show subverts expectations twice in only the first episode — Vanessa lays the cards out in a traditional Celtic Cross pattern, not a 3-card Past/Present/Future spread, and the card that Ethan draws is from the crown position (the guiding forces upon the situation), and it's The Lovers.
  • Vanessa does another reading in "What Death Can Join Together", presumably for herself. It is a 3-card Past/Present/Future, though we only see the first two cards. The Past card is the Five of Cups, meaning near-total loss and grief, ignorance of important things one still has (alluding to the rift between the Murrays and Iveses, but that Mina is still alive). The Present card is The Moon, symbolizing unknown forces working against the questioner, darkness and magic (alluding to Malcolm and the plague ship, and Vanessa and whatever Dorian did to invoke the possession).
  • Victor turns over one of the cards in "Possession". It is, of course, the Death card — referring to Vanessa being near-death from the possession and the great, sweeping change that the entire ordeal will effect on everyone in the house.
  • The Cut-Wife teaches Vanessa how to read tarot in "The Nightcomers", and Vanessa draws the Devil card. There is a point made that it's not simply evil, it's "the whisper of a dark lover, or something frightening inside yourself", a Call-Back to Vanessa's ordeal with the possession and the asylum.
• Title Drop:
  • In the second episode, a police inspector makes reference to "newspapers and penny dreadfuls" sensationalizing the murders he's investigating.
  • Vincent tells Caliban that the play they're currently performing (a Sweeney Todd adaptation) comes from one.
  • One shows up in the sixth episode, namely Varney the Vampire, with Victor expressing shock that Van Helsing pays attention to penny dreadfuls.
• Token Wizard: Vanessa is not the only supernatural member of the main cast (Dorian is immortal, while Ethan is a werewolf), but she is the only one to purposefully make use of her magical abilities and knowledge.
• Took a Level in Badass: Victor asks Ethan to teach him the use of firearms and, as a result, acquits himself quite well in the "Grand Guignol" fight sequence.
• Traumatic Haircut: Vanessa received one during her stay in an asylum.
• True Companions: Malcolm invokes this trope in the second episode. By the end of the first season, the main characters are clearly coming to think of one another as family.
• Turned Against Their Masters: To avenge the Cut-Wife, Vanessa uses Black Magic to make Sir Geoffrey's own dogs turn upon and kill him.
• Twice-Told Tale: The twist about Frankenstein's first and second creations is clearly intended to mess with the expectations of audiences already familiar with the Frankenstein story.
• Two First Names: Ethan Chandler, though this is later averted with his true surname Talbot, and Malcolm Murray.
• Unflinching Walk:
  • Vanessa walks through a furious vampire fight without batting an eye.
  • Hecate calmly walks out of her mother's mansion and away as it burns to the ground behind her, singing to herself.
• Unkempt Beauty: Dorian Gray spends much of his introductory episode in a loose robe or incomplete formal wear. Brona may also fit this trope, at least in comparison to Vanessa.
• The Unseen: Lyle's wife. She's also a Lady Drunk, if Lyle is to be trusted.
• Van Helsing Hate Crimes: Ethan seems to be the only one worried about the vampiric kid they're keeping chained up in Sir Malcolm's cellar and interrogating/experimenting upon/beating. Victor is looking at it from a scientific perspective, Malcolm admittedly wants vengeance and a cure for Mina, Sembene is a Noble Savage totally loyal to Malcolm, and Vanessa acknowledges to Ethan it's difficult, but they need their answers. It's implied that Ethan is a werewolf, and worried this could happen to him if the group found out.
• Victorian London: Much of the show is set in London, beginning in 1891, 10 years before Queen Victoria would die.
• Victorian Novel Disease:
  • Brona's consumption. One of the other characters lampshades this trope, pointing out, "Who doesn't love a lost cause?"
  • Frankenstein's mother died from the same thing.
• Vomiting Cop: In the pilot, while the lead detective and the crime scene photographer hold a conversation at the scene of a mutilation killing, a constable is seen in the background puking into a wastebasket. You might be vomiting, too, if you were potentially faced with one of Jack the Ripper's murders.
• Voodoo Doll: Mrs. Poole keeps a whole roomful of Satanic witchcraft-poppets.

W-Z

• Wall Bang Her: Ethan with a groupie, Dorian with Brona Croft, and Sir Malcolm with Vanessa's mother and oral sex with Evelyn.
• We Hardly Knew Ye:
  • Proteus.
  • Also Van Helsing.
  • Some fans feel this way about Sembene's death, as his backstory had just barely been touched upon at the time, and he barely got any dialogue or focus.
• Weirdness Censor: Magical events occur on a regular basis in this version of London, yet most people continue to believe that there are perfectly mundane explanations for them. Part of the trouble for the characters in season 2 is that Inspector Rusk is a bit more open-minded.
  • Thrown out the window by the start of "Perpetual Night", as Dracula's apocalypse has beset London in ways no one can ignore, with toads coming up the drains en masse, poisonous fog, and a city full of vampires.
• "Well Done, Son" Guy:
  • Malcolm's son, Peter, was a sickly, bookish child rather than the tough, manly son his father wanted. He joined his father's expedition to Africa to prove himself, and died horribly of dysentery.
  • Victor has a case of this going on with both his own father (whom he disappointed, and it's implied his father preferred Victor's more athletic brothers) and Malcolm (whom he seems to regard as a second chance at not-disappointing a father).
• Wham Episode: Every episode has an amazing moment or reveal that would, in any other series, be a Wham Episode. Here are the standouts.
  • "Seance", for the spectacular set-piece that is Vanessa Ives being possessed by four separate entities at Lyle's seance, and giving the world's most hellacious Calling the Old Man Out speech to Malcolm. Then, if that's not enough, Victor takes Proteus out for a day in the real world, they return home, only for Caliban to make his grand entrance, tear Proteus apart at his seams, and announce himself as Victor's firstborn.
  • "Grand Guignol". Malcolm shoots a vampiric Mina in the head rather than allow Vanessa to be harmed, Ethan is revealed to be a werewolf, and Victor euthanizes Brona and plans to turn her into Caliban's Bride.
  • "And Hell Itself My Only Foe". Vanessa goes to meet Evelyn alone and discovers the voodoo doll Evelyn made can talk. Victor hallucinates all three of his creations returning to him. Hecate aligns herself with Ethan and propositions him to be his most devoted follower. During the invasion of Evelyn's castle, Ethan wolfs out and Sembene sacrifices himself to the werewolf so that the rest might survive.
  • "The Day Tennyson Died". The group has scattered to the four winds, with Malcolm encountering an old ally of Ethan's in Zanzibar, Caliban avoiding cannibalism in the Arctic, Victor calling on his old school friend, Dr. Jekyll, Ethan being kidnapped by allies of his father's, and Vanessa suffering a deep depression in London, seeking treatment from a woman who may certainly be a descendant of the Cut-Wife, but is also Doctor Seward from Dracula. The episode ends with Seward's assistant — a man named Renfield — encountering the infamous Dracula himself.
• Wham Line:
  • "Father mine, let me come with you..." ( Peter Murray possessing Vanessa, in "Seance")
  • "Your firstborn has returned, Father." (The Creature to Victor in "Seance")
  • "You have to name a thing to make it live, don't you?" ( The Demon, in the form of Malcolm to Vanessa in "Closer than Sisters")
  • "But I love you in a different way. I love you enough to kill you." (Vanessa to Mina in "Closer than Sisters")
  • "Course, I know that place pretty well. You might say it was where I was flung." ( The Demon, in the form of Ethan to Vanessa in "Possession")
  • "My monster. My beautiful corpse. How clever he's been, our creator ... but our little god has brought forth, not angels, but demons" ( Lily, revealing to the Creature that she knows exactly what they are, in "Memento Mori")
  • "Your children have returned, Father." ( Proteus, in Victor's hallucination in "And Hell Itself My Only Foe")
  • "My name is Renfield." Followed quickly by the Wham Line to end all Wham Lines: "My name is Dracula." (from "The Day Tennyson Died")
• Wham Shot:
  • As Renfield drinks blood from Dracula's wrist, Dracula looks up into the camera to reveal that he is Dr. Alexander Sweet.
  • The reveal at the end of "Good and Evil Braided Be" that the orderly from Vanessa's stay in the asylum (seen in "Closer Than Sisters") was John Clare/Caliban/the Creature in his previous life.
• What the Hell, Hero?:
  • In "Demimonde", Ethan is quick to call out the others on torturing Fenton for information and letting Frankenstein experiment on him in hopes of finding a cure for vampirism.
  • In "Closer Than Sisters", Sir Malcolm denounces Vanessa for seducing Mina's fiance.
  • In "Possession", it's both Ethan and Victor who finally call out Malcolm on the dangerous ends he's gone to, manipulating Vanessa's demon in order to have a potential conduit to Mina.
  • In "Little Scorpion", Ethan gives Vanessa a pretty brutal one for using black magic to murder Sir Geoffrey out of revenge for what he did to the Cut-wife.
• What You Are in the Dark: In "Possession", Malcolm nearly talks a dying and possessed Vanessa into contacting Mina, using her pain and suffering for his own personal gain. He's stopped by Ethan and Victor, but it's very clear it's only a matter of time until he tries again.
  • In "Grand Guignol", Victor takes a level in amorality when he murders the dying Brona and intends to use her body to create a Bride for his Creature. It might have been less sketchy if he used Brona's body after she died of natural causes, never mind that he lied to Ethan about it.
  • This is in general an important theme of the series, with its tag line being "there's something within us all."
• Whole Episode Flashback:
  • "Closer Than Sisters" is dedicated entirely to Vanessa and Mina's backstory.
  • "The Nightcomers" deals with Vanessa's first encounter with the witch coven.
  • "A Blade of Grass" shows us Vanessa's time in the asylum.
• Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: In "Little Scorpion", Vanessa tells Ethan she hates dolls. Guess what Evelyn uses to control her victims and what she's constructed in Vanessa's image?
• The Wild West:
  • In the first episode, Ethan is working as a sharpshooter in a traveling show that presents The Theme Park Version of the West.
  • The setting itself appears in season three, as Ethan and Hecate — and later, Sir Malcolm and Kaetenay — travel throughout the New Mexico Territory.
• Willing Channeler: Madame Kali for Amunet. Vanessa's case is more complex — sometimes she seems willing, at others not, and we don't know how many entities she may be channeling at a given time.
• Wolf Man: As many fans guessed, Ethan's a werewolf.
• Wight in a Wedding Dress: Vanessa wears white as Dracula's bride.
• World of Badass: With the possible exception of Brona, every main character is several times braver and tougher than your average person.
• Would Hurt a Child: Hecate slaughters a family on a train so that Evelyn can use the baby in a ritual.
• You Called Me "X"; It Must Be Serious: When Sir Malcolm starts to succumb to possession in "Memento Mori", Sembene drops his servile mannerisms and calls him simply "Malcolm", because he's more concerned for his friend than for maintaining social proprieties.
• You Monster!: Ethan is so furious with Malcolm's treatment of Vanessa in "Possession" that he threatens to kill him. Victor feels much the same way, asking Malcolm, "Have you not a shred of decency left?"

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