Dread judging

I've been watching Penny Dreadful and enjoying it in a big way. This is in large part because of Eva Green's amazing performance as Vanessa Ives, which really has to be seen to be believed – it's sort of the definition of a performance that "leaves it all up there on the screen" – and it's probably good that the first series is only 8 episodes long, because she'd surely be mentally and physically exhausted if she had to film much more of it. Also though and in particular, I think it's good at doing dread. (Dread-full, even.) And I like me some dread, I does.

I guess that would lead people to think I'm a fan of horror movies, but it's actually a genre I'm not hugely into. There are some good ones of course, but I'd argue not many that create a feeling of dread as I'd define it. I think many horror movies produce apprehension instead – a state where you know a bad thing is going to happen, and you get nervous just waiting for it to occur. I think dread, on the other hand, is the creeping sensation that something is wrong, but you're not quite sure how it's wrong yet, and you don't quite know what's going to happen – only that it won't be good. As modern dictionaries go, I think apprehension and dread are probably more or less interchangeable, but it's the creeping that's key I think. You can't really have creeping apprehension. Dread always creeps on to you to, though – first onto you  ("skin-crawling") and then in proper cases, into you ("bone-chilling").

The Victorians did it right with all things Gothic. And Penny Dreadful is pretty properly Gothic in that respect (with a bit of gore still thrown in, because hey, it's still 2014 here). One of the complaints people have about the show is that things are quite slow to happen, but I kind of think that's that what they're going for in that old-school way – it's not so much about seeing what's going to happen as spending large amounts of time feeling increasingly uneasy about the prospect of anything happening at all.

Hey Edgar Allen Poe, why don't you just illustrate this point for me? OK Ben, here's The Masque of the Red Death. It is less than 2,500 words long and in it, some people go to a party, and it is one of the most seriously unsettling things ever. Plot: who needs it.