Universal Pictures, towards the end of its cycle of horror movies in the 1940s, began having monster mashes, films where Frankenstein and the Wolf Man and Dracula butted heads with each other. John Logan, the creator of Penny Dreadful, is doing much the same thing here. However, he is not using the film versions of the monsters for inspiration. Rather, following Alan Moore's example, he is going back to their literary roots. He specifically said, in one of his many YouTube videos, that he was combining the story lines of Frankenstein, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Dracula. Although he didn't mention it in any video I saw (and, darn, who has the time to listen to them all?), he also added a prostitute dying of tuberculosis who might remind one of a certain Les Misérables character. He has an African explorer as a lead character, but he cites the real and great Victorian explorers as his inspirations, not H. Rider Haggard and his Allan Quatermain. He probably won't admit to borrowing from the non-Victorian and non-classy William Peter Blatty.

This is the team of five heroes banded together to rescue Mina Harker nee Murray from a vampire master.

1. Sir Malcolm Murray, the African explorer.
2. Vanessa Ives, who like the woman from Acts with an unclean spirit has psychic abilities because of her resident demon
3. Ethan Chandler, an American sharpshooter, hired gun, werewolf (the latter trait not much emphasized)
4. Dr. Victor Frankenstein, a young physician in need of money to finance his researches
5. Sembene, an African who works as Sir Malcolm's servant but is obviously something more

There are others out of the team but connected to the members:

1. Dorian Gray, a young man enamored of Miss Ives but quite happy to seduce anyone who is available
2. Frankenstein's monster, who, to my joy, is very much Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, angry over his creator's desertion, insistent on having a bride made, well educated in the great English poets (as is Miss Ives' devil)
3. Brona Croft, an Irish prostitute dying of tuberculosis whom Chandler loves and whom Frankenstein has designs on

If you want to know where Dracula is, know that the vampire master is not a courtly European count but a Nosferatu who speaks only in growls and hisses. Very disappointing, that.

Logan has largely succeeded with his classy mix of Masterpiece Theatre sets and costumes, gothic story lines, and aberrant sex and violence. I'm tempted to go through the actors who play the characters and tell you how good they are but there are too many of them. I will give special notice to Eva Green as Vanessa Ives. She had to disrupt a séance in one episode by displaying a small legion of dead and angry spirits. In another, she had to lose her mind and be subjected to the very best Victorian treatment for mental illness, said treatment based on hydrotherapy and what looked like small-scale trepanning. In the penultimate episode, she went through a possession so believable that I feared to watch. ( )