Editorials
“Penny Dreadful” Was Meant to End After Three Seasons? I’m Not Buying It.
As many of you may have heard, Showtime’s fantastic horror series The Eva Green Variety Hour Penny Dreadful was cancelled earlier this week. Well, cancelled may not be the appropriate word. According to series creator John Logan, he realized during Season 2 that the series and Vanessa Ives’ (Eva Green) arc would come to an end simultaneously. Logan said the following in a statement:
“I created ‘Penny Dreadful’ to tell the story of a woman grappling with her faith, and with the demons inside her. For me the character of Vanessa Ives is the heart of this series. From the beginning, I imagined her story would unfold over a three-season arc, ending with Vanessa finally — and triumphantly — finding peace as she returns to her faith.”
You can read Entertainment Weekly’s interview with Logan and Showtime CEO David Nevins here for more insight onto how the series final came to fruition.
***SPOILERS for the series finale of Penny Dreadful to follow.***
Forgive me for being crass, but I call bullshit. Showtime told Logan that they were going to cancel it and he was forced to end his series. Penny Dreadful was never a ratings winner. It was never able to match the series high of 872,000 viewers for the pilot episode in 2014, and even that is about half the viewers of a normal episode of Shameless. Penny Dreadful is also a ridiculously expensive series to produce (which explains how the much more cost-effective Masters of Sex secured a fourth season renewal last year). The money shows in the gorgeous set design, but apparently budget cuts were out of the question.
I would argue that the series was never solely about Vanessa’s arc. It was called Penny Dreadful, not Vanessa Ives. The series served as a more serious version of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen that saw literatures famous horror characters brought to life through Logan’s eyes. It was always about the ensemble, even if Vanessa Ives was the most interesting facet of that ensemble. Vanessa grew to become the emotional center of the series, but just because her life is over doesn’t mean the series has to be over as well. No, dwindling ratings and an expensive budget brought Penny Dreadful to an end. Showtime knew it and had to break the news to Logan, thus creating their “mutual agreement” to end the series.
But could Penny Dreadful function without Eva Green? For three seasons, she has been the heart and soul of the show. Does her death merit ending the series? Is it alright to cut the other characters’ stories short so long as Vanessa’s receives closure? That is up to you to decide. There were several loose ends tied up. Vanessa’s arc was the main one, of course. Malcolm received some closure over Mina’s death. Ethan accepted his role in Vanessa’s fate. The Creature was able to bury his son. That’s the extent of finality with “The Blessed Dark.”
What hurts the most is knowing all of the storylines that we’ll never get to see, especially after all of the Easter Eggs that were planted this season. We will never see Dr. Jekyll become Mr. Hyde. Well, not Robert Louis Stevenson’s version of him anyway, as Jekyll did earn his father’s title of Lord Hyde in his final scene (maybe that was the point all along). The introduction of characters like Jekyll, Dr. Seward (a superb Patti LuPone) and Catriona Hartdegen seems superfluous if this was truly meant to be the final season. Why waste time on these new characters if that was the case (not that I’m complaining, as both characters were welcome additions that I desperately wanted to see more of)? Leave them out and focus on the characters you already have established. Hartdegen seemed poised to be a Vanessa Ives stand-in following her death, so maybe Showtime realized that that would have been a fruitless effort. You can’t simply replace Eva Green and call it a day.
Where will Lily go from here? Are they just going to let Dracula go? Will anyone ever find out that Victor brings people back from the dead? Will Dorian’s painting ever be discovered? And what about that Season 4 tease with Ferdinand Lyle going to Cairo to see Imhotep’s tomb? If the plan was to always end this season, Lyle’s casual mention of Imhotep just seems like a cruel taunting from Logan, as opposed to a fun Easter Egg.
Some other plot threads that were left dangling (courtesy of our own Daniel Baldwin during a lengthy Facebook conversation we had last night):
– Malcolm, Ethan, and Lyle (who was VASTLY underused this season) still don’t know about Victor’s experiments.
– Ethan is still totally unaware that Victor murdered and resurrected Brona as Lily.
– Kaetenay aside, no one else in the group knows that Ethan is a werewolf or that he killed Sembene.
– Vanessa is dead, but the battle isn’t over. She was explicitly told last season that if she died, the “Mother of Evil” curse would simply pass to another.
– The Creature hasn’t met anyone else in the group beyond Victor.
I’m not saying I need everything wrapped up in a neat little bow, but this is just silly. There was so much material to mine stories from in a fourth season, and I truly think that Logan wanted to continue these characters’ stories. Sadly, we will never get to see them.
Of course, I could be totally wrong. Maybe John Logan did always intend for Penny Dreadful to be the story of Vanessa’s journey. Maybe this article is just the ramblings of a person distraught with grief because a show he loved was taken from him too soon. I sincerely hope that’s the case, but I have my doubts. At the very least, we got 27 episodes of this wonderful under-watched series. Like many deaths, you don’t always realize how much you loved it until its gone. I’m sorry Penny Dreadful. I took you for granted. Consider it a lesson learned. You’ll live on in Blu-Ray form next to my copies of NBC’s Hannibal. R.I.P.
What were your thoughts on the series finale of Penny Dreadful? Are you buying the story that Showtime is selling or are you, like me, more skeptical? Let me know in the comments below!
Of the three films that make up the Diabolical Trinity of classic religious horror films—Rosemary’s Baby (1968), The Exorcist (1973), and The Omen (1976)—The Omen is the most purely entertaining.
While Rosemary’s Baby digs into the societal shifts of the 60s and The Exorcist explores spiritual tensions between faith and doubt in an ever-shifting world, The Omen seems most interested in just telling a thrilling story. It achieves this by blending two major trends of the 1970s, the devil movie and the paranoid thriller, into one crackling adventure yarn. In the process, The Omen has sparked fear and curiosity about what could happen in the “end times” if such events are to occur.
After seeing The Exorcist, producer Harvey Bernhard contacted writer David Seltzer and said something along the lines of, “Hey, write me one of those.” Seltzer, having never read the Bible, thought it would be an interesting challenge, so, according to various interviews, he read the Bible and several commentaries in search of a story. Then he stumbled upon a passage in the book of Revelation, the image of a great Beast rising out of the sea, that sparked his imagination. In the commentaries, he found that the sea represented politics in some interpretations of the text, and he began building his story on that foundation.
Seltzer has told this story often, and I am inclined to believe him. However, from there, much of the theological-sounding lore of The Omen was created purely by Seltzer. Many of the ideas surrounding The Antichrist in the film appear to be drawn much more from the pop-eschatology sensation of the 1970s, The Late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsay, than any Biblical source.
Lindsay’s book was the bestselling nonfiction book of the 1970s and re-popularized views of the “last days” that had been dying along with fundamentalism for decades, namely Dispensationalism, Millennialism, and the Pre-Tribulation Rapture. In dispensationalism, history is broken into several epochs of time (or dispensations) that culminate in the return of Christ and his thousand-year (millennial) reign.
Before this return, a seven-year Tribulation will occur in which the Antichrist comes to power and persecutes all who oppose him, culminating in a battle between the forces of good and evil at the valley of Megiddo, usually called Armageddon. Of course, in this worldview, the true believers in Jesus will be lifted out, or raptured, before all this takes place. Since the publication and popularity of The Late Great Planet Earth, this has been the prominent belief in Evangelical and Fundamentalist Christian circles, though Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and mainline Protestant denominations largely reject it.
Lindsay also did something unique that had not been the case even in dispensationalist circles before him—he posited that the creation of the modern state of Israel in 1948 started the countdown to Armageddon. Fans of the film will immediately realize where Seltzer ran with this idea in the first line of the poem created for the movie: “When the Jews return to Zion…”
Damien Thorn and the Creation of Horror’s “Innocent Villain”
Seltzer’s next inspiration focused on the idea of the Antichrist as a child, what he would call the film’s “innocent villain.” In watching The Omen, it is readily apparent that Damien Thorn (Harvey Stephens) does not really do anything evil beyond a bit of normal kid mischief. Even the moment in which Damien knocks Kathy Thorn (Lee Remick) over a second-floor railing can be read as an accident orchestrated by Damien’s diabolically connected nanny, Mrs. Baylock (Billie Whitelaw). The film takes this idea of the innocent villain a step further by casting Gregory Peck, best known for playing arguably the greatest father in film history, Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), as Damien’s earthly father, an element that greatly satisfied Seltzer.
The New Testament itself says very little about the Antichrist and certainly nothing about his childhood. In fact, the word antichrist is used twice (1 John 2:18 and 2 John 7 for the curious) and refers to groups of people, not a particular person. There is also a passage in 2 Thessalonians 2:1-12 in which the writer (usually attributed to Paul) discusses “The Man of Lawlessness” who will “exalt himself over everything that is called God” and “proclaim himself to be God.”
Then there is the Beast of Revelation chapter 13 with “seven heads and ten horns” that Seltzer latched onto, which has been interpreted in a multitude of ways over the centuries. Powerful people throughout history, from Charlemagne, various Popes during the Protestant Reformation era, Napoleon and Hitler, to modern politicians, including Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Vladimir Putin, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump, have all had the label placed on them by various circles. Even religious leaders like Billy Graham have not escaped being called the Antichrist.
Lindsay and modern dispensationalists are certain the Antichrist will be a 21st-century individual as they are equally certain that the Rapture, Tribulation, and return of Christ are imminent, likely within their lifetime. Many scholars and theologians, however, interpret these passages as symbolic representations of the Roman Empire and the first-century Caesars who persecuted, tortured, and murdered Christians and Jews who refused to submit to Imperial rule and worship them as gods. For example, that the Beast from the sea in Revelation has seven heads is symbolic of the famous seven mountains of Rome, with the 10 horns referring to rulers and magistrates of the Empire.
But this is all really of no matter to Seltzer and the story of The Omen. Instead of being concerned with any historical or theological accuracy, he instead built his own lore, which sends Robert Thorn and photographer Keith Jennings (David Warner) on a globetrotting investigation into the nature of the Antichrist and how to stop him. Some of this lore includes the child being born of a jackal, the reaction of animals, the protective cult that arises around Damien, the daggers of Megiddo, and maybe most interesting of all, the peculiar flaws in Jennings’s photographs that presage the ways certain individuals will die.
All these aspects are where the paranoid thrillers come in, as films like Blow Up (1966), Z (1969), The Conversation (1974), The Parallax View (1974), 3 Days of the Condor (1975), and All the President’s Men (1976) were all the rage at the time. Especially in the wake of the Watergate scandal, the idea of journalists (like Jennings) as ordinary heroes who could bring down the powerful, nefarious forces in the world was exactly what audiences craved. And what greater hidden evil force was there than the Devil? This is also why the device of the daggers of Megiddo is so important to a movie like this. If Damien is indeed the Antichrist, there must be a way to stop him, though in the Biblical text, the only power capable of destroying the Devil is God Himself.
The Mark of the Beast, 666, and the Film’s Most Famous Religious Symbolism
The piece of lore created for the movie with the most solid Biblical grounding is the Mark of the Beast. Revelation describes a mark on the forehead or hand of those who worship the Beast and his image. Again, this is symbolic language differentiating those who belong to the power of the Roman Empire and those who belong to Christ, who have the Mark of the Lamb. In Seltzer’s hands, the mark is very literal, a birthmark that is borne by not only the Antichrist but all his followers, meaning they are marked from before birth as belonging to Satan, and there is no escaping it. This is all rather distressing to the priest Father Brennan (Patrick Troughton), who betrays his mark by warning Thorn about Damien and pays the price by memorably being impaled by a spire that falls from a church steeple after being struck by lightning.
Why is the mark three sixes? Again, this is drawn from a passage in Revelation that states that the Beast can be identified by calculating his number. In Biblical scholarship, this is believed to be the sum of the name of a man transferred into Hebrew numerology, a practice in which each Hebrew letter also represents a number. Using this method, the number of the name Caesar Nero, which many believe to be the most logical choice, is six hundred sixty-six. In the film and elsewhere, this number is changed to three individual sixes. According to the film, this represents the Diabolical Trinity (a designation also unique to the film) made up of Satan, the Antichrist, and the False Prophet. That Damien carries this unique birthmark under his hair convinces Robert that the child is the Antichrist, and it’s up to him to destroy him.
Part of what makes The Omen great is its ambiguity. Damien could be the Antichrist, or he could be at the center of a series of coincidences. Director Richard Donner stated in interviews that he believed Robert Thorn had gone insane by the end of the film, which, to Donner, is the only explanation for why Thorn would attempt to kill an innocent child. However, that enigmatic smile in the final shot suggests that Damien does embody a spirit of great evil. The sequels, however, all but erase this ambiguity.
In audiences, The Omen sparked a renewed interest in the concept of the Antichrist and the dispensationalist interpretation of the end times that continues to echo throughout the last five decades. Around the time of the film’s release, even Elvis Presley was photographed brandishing a paperback copy of Seltzer’s novelization. Dispensationalist authors like Hal Lindsay, Tim LaHaye, and John Hagee have made millions publishing books and giving lectures about the Antichrist and the end of the world.
The Legacy of The Omen, 50 Years Later
Though A Thief in the Night (1972) preceded The Omen in initial release, it gained quite a resurgence (along with the ability to create three sequels) in the wake of the popularity of The Omen and went on to scar the psyches of Evangelical children for decades. Hal Lindsay was also able to release a film version of The Late Great Planet Earth in 1978, complete with narration and a brief onscreen appearance from Orson Welles.
In the 1990s, the Left Behind series became a cultural phenomenon, spawning twelve books in the core series, a YA spinoff series, video games, and a movie series (2000-2005) starring Kirk Cameron. A bigger studio adaptation of the first book was released in 2014, starring Nicolas Cage. 20th Century Fox and The Omen got in on the renewed “end-of-the-world” vigor by releasing a remake of the original film on June 6, 2006. The franchise was revived once again in 2024 with The First Omen, which explores ideas of the Antichrist and the motivations of those in power in our current religious, social, and political context.
But despite all the sequels, spinoffs, rip-offs, remakes, and “end times” money grabs of the last 50 years, the original version of The Omen remains untouchable. Its greatest strength is that it seeks, first and foremost, to entertain. And it does so admirably.
After half a century, its influence can be felt in horror, the culture at large, and even in various faith circles. It is a testament to the power of story and film that, consciously or unconsciously, fans of The Omen and those who have never seen it alike are, to this very day, marked by the Beast.
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