Nightmare Fuel / Penny Dreadful

With a title like Penny Dreadful, you know there's going to be plenty of nightmarish sights and scenes littered throughout this series.

As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.

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Season One

• The Jump Scare at the beginning of the pilot, where the young mother is ripped through a window by an unseen creature.
• The abattoir the vampires have turned the basement of the opium den into: vivisected human bodies everywhere, blood pooling on the floor, and a dead human mother and infant with puncture wounds on their necks.
• The spider infestation that signals Vanessa's Demonic Possession in "Night Work", and the sudden appearance of thousands of them pouring out of Vanessa's tarot cards in "Possession".
• The seance scene in “Seance”, where Vanessa channels something incredibly old, dark, and evil, as well as being taken over by the personality of Peter Murray. The screams alone…
  • Not to mention the way Vanessa is contorting herself, and the vocal mimicry that’s going on (both the demonic hiss and Peter’s voice coming through Vanessa’s mouth).
    • Enhanced by the fact that Dorian Gray looks like he's genuinely frightened. The immortal and eternally young/healthy debauché who expressed a curious pleasure at, in his words, "fucking a dying creature", looks terrified.
    • the fact that in the comics it turns out Lucifer is the one who gave Dorian his youth, his fear is probably he thinks that it has finally came to collect.
  • The revelations in what she says are pretty horrifying too, and Peter's death throes combine Nightmare Fuel with Tear Jerker.
• The return of Victor Frankenstein’s first Creature. He shoves his fist through Proteus’ chest, ripping his heart out and tearing him in half along his suture lines.
• When he was young, little Victor had to endure the death of his mother from consumption. During one scene, she coughs up blood all over his face.
• The Creature's "birth" is decidedly different from that of Proteus — he wakes up covered in what looks like a bath of blood, screaming his head off and flailing about, scaring Frankenstein senseless. Honestly, can you really blame the latter for running away in horror?
• The loving closeups of the maggot-filled body of Bradshaw, young Victor Frankenstein's pet dog.
• Fenton ripping the flesh out of the monkeys at the zoo with his bare teeth. The Renfield has never been so disgusting.
  • At least, not until the actual Renfield outdoes him in season 3, slurping at the bloody ankles of a naked, hook-hung human corpse.
• Sembene solving the problem of how to feed Fenton — wringing a cat's neck and throwing it to Fenton, who starts crunching and slurping away at its corpse.
• The way that Fenton crawls up the stairs in the dark is very unsettling.
  • Heck, any scene where the vampires' familiars are scuttling about on all fours qualifies.
• Vanessa convulsing in bed, completely naked and with her head shaved, presumably having sex with an invisible demon. When she turns to face the door...her eyes are completely white. Her mother dies of fright when she sees it, much like many viewers at home almost did.
• Vanessa being locked in a Bedlam House for her illness/possession. She's thrown into ice baths, sprayed with fire hoses, strapped to a bed and injected with drugs, and finally, given a trepanation, her head shaved and holes drilled into her cranial cavity. All seen in excruciating detail, and all Truth in Television.
• Victor peers through the blinds of Malcolm's house in "Possession". In the distance, he sees the Creature standing in the shadows, watching him. He's still there when Victor checks again later. You're biting your nails, expecting him to leap out of the darkness at any time and kill somebody...but he never does.
• Everything about Vanessa's possession in the episode of the same name, which is more aggressive than at any other time in the series up to this point.
  • The knowledge that Malcolm meant for Vanessa to be possessed, so he could use her abilities to find Mina, is horrifying.
  • The exorcism scene, which rivals The Exorcist for scariest seen on film.
• Brona's fate at the end of Season 1 is...controversial, for good reason. But if Victor hadn't used the pillow? Brona would have spent several more hours slowly drowning in her own blood, inch by inch (and Victor saw it happen to his mother, which is probably one of the reasons he genuinely sees her passing as a "thing of grace"...) But the real Nightmare Fuel here? If Brona was still alive at sundown, she and Victor would have been two more corpses in the Mariner's Inn Massacre.

Season Two

• The witches, oh my God, the witches. Occasionally naked, bodies slashed and scarred and branded, red eyes, sharpened fangs — they're a LOT scarier than the vampires.
  • Most of all is Evelyn Poole, really. First there's her bathing in a tub filled with the blood of freshly-killed girls, with skeletons on the walls. Then there's her gleeful killing of the witch who failed to retrieve Vanessa, cackling and casually flicking open a knife hidden in her ring to slash the girl's throat. The topper is her Black Magic scene at the end — drawing an upside-down cross on her forehead in her own blood, chanting in diabolical Latin, and invoking Lucifer, her "master".
  • Vanessa at the end as well, giving in to the lure of black magic. She uses her own blood to draw a scorpion and seems to be (perhaps unconsciously) imitating/echoing Evelyn.
• Evelyn and the witches continue to be terrifying, from the mundane of Evelyn blackmailing Mr. Lyle with photographic proof of his homosexuality, to the fantastic of Hecate pursuing and murdering a young couple to steal their baby so her mother can rip its heart out and place it in an incredibly Creepy Doll of Vanessa for some sympathetic magic.
  • Worst of all, there are dozens of similar dolls already on display all around the room. Just how many defenseless babies and their families have these witches murdered, to craft so many?
  • Even worse? Some of those dolls resemble Lyle, Mina, and The Vampire.
• Early on in "Verbis Diablo," Malcolm takes Vanessa to an underground food bank for the poor and sickly. As they take their places, in a Freeze-Frame Bonus, Evelyn appears beside Vanessa.
• The climax of "The Nightcomers" is horrific. A mob, complete with Torches and Pitchforks, marches to Ballantree Moor and burns the Cut-Wife alive. They even pour boiling tar all over her before they light it. The image of the Cut-Wife opening her eyes through the tar before she's burned is extremely haunting.
  • That's not boiling tar. It's too runny, and there would be a lot more visible physical damage if it was. It's oil to light her with.
• Evelyn's Creepy Dolls turn out to be Voodoo Dolls. Her first onscreen victim is Gladys Murray, who she renders insane by cracking the doll's head open, exposing an actual brain, and sticking hot needles into it. Gladys screams in agony throughout the episode, eventually hallucinating her children crawling out of their graves and tormenting her, leading her to kill herself.
• Dorian's portrait. For most of the series it's hidden, and when you actually see it for the first time, it's horrific enough to look at. Then it turns its head to stare directly at Dorian (and the viewer). Guaranteed to make you jump out of your skin.
  • The implication is fantastic: somehow, the image is alive, and the chains it's wrapped up in are meant to hold it away from this man who bestows pain and agony by living while the painting takes all the damage and sin.
  • Also, Dorian finally being revealed as a cold-blooded and casual murderer, despite plenty of fans' assumptions that this version of him hadn't yet fallen that far into corruption. His angelic looks and gracious mannerisms actually fooled the audience as much as he did the other characters!
• Lily's rant in "Memento Mori", revealing to Caliban that she knows exactly what she is and what she was made for, and how she plans to take revenge on all mankind for her condition and suffering. Even Caliban is terrified, and the terror doesn't go away when she switches gears and starts to seduce him. Victor needs to watch his back...
• Malcolm being tortured by Evelyn's hallucinations at the end of "Memento Mori", with his wife and children rising from the dead. There are also clues as to the manner of their deaths: Gladys's throat is slashed, Mina has a bullet hole in her head, and Peter is bleeding from the mouth and eyes.
• It wasn't enough to have Creepy Dolls used for sympathetic magical torture, oh no. Evelyn's creations can open their eyes and speak.
  • It gets even worse when we find out that that one doll is talking because Satan is speaking through it.
• While it's hard to feel sympathy given what she did, it's still gripping when Lavinia comes down into the cellar where she believes the Creature is imprisoned, calling out to him. When she gets no reply, she assumes he's sleeping and launches into a rant on how she never cared for him and it disgusted her being around him and she'll enjoy making money off showing him off. She continues, completely unaware of her mother and father lying dead at her feet and the Creature slowly coming toward her, circling her for a bit. You can see him mulling over how utterly easy it would be to kill this blind girl...but then decides it's far more satisfying to just walk away and leave her to find out the truth eventually. Our last shot of Lavinia is her still smiling at being the "victor" with no idea of how much she's lost.
  • Now think on this. Lavinia is blind and in a rough part of town, with no one to look after her. Who would find her first? And what would happen when they do?
• In the season finale, a rage-filled and jealous Victor storms into Dorian's manor to demand Lily return to him. He finds Dorian and Lily in all white formal wear, dancing a waltz. Lily drops all acts of innocence and taunts him. Enraged, Victor snaps and shoots her through the heart. When nothing happens, he freaks out and shoots Dorian to no effect. Dorian Gray looks up from his bleeding wound, smiles and says "You'll have to do better than that, sport." Reeve Carney is terrifying.
  • And then Dorian and Lily resume their dance, dress whites soaked in blood and a trail of it smeared over the floor behind them.
  • And this is AFTER Lily tore Dorian's ear off with her teeth to test his healing abilities.
• Ethan and Sembene are trapped in the stairwell as the full moon rises. Ethan, knowing exactly what his werewolf-self will do to his friend, begs Sembene to shoot him or let him do it himself, before it's too late. Sembene refuses because he believes Ethan's destiny is greater than his own, even though he knows he's going to die and that Ethan would rather be shot than live with the guilt of tearing him apart.

Season Three

• A much less supernatural entry, but a thought about the kind of man Ethan's father is: when Ethan is stolen away from Rusk's captivity on the New Mexico railway, his father's agents have no compunctions about gunning down innocent men and women as they escape. That such nasty men are gladly in the service of a cattle rancher powerful and cruel enough to scare Ethan — a fiercely self-protective wolfman — across the ocean to England speaks volumes as to the kind of man Ethan is soon going to be dealing with.
• Victor, far gone into addiction and envy and lust, and desperate to be rid of Lily, asks his old school friend Henry Jekyll to help him kill her. He has little idea of the horrors Jekyll himself is hiding, and possibly willing to let free in the pursuit of revenge.
  • Jekyll himself returns the horror, suggesting to Frankenstein they try first to restore Lily's shy and domestic nature — her natural goodness — for Victor's pleasure. This is a fate that, for Lily at least, would be worse than death.
• If you've put the pieces together about where Doctor Seward's name comes from and who Seward's assistant is, you're already terrified when he's kidnapped by two vampires. Then more of them start appearing — this isn't the small, weak coven we saw in season one, this is a sheer army of vampires. And it gets worse: their master is Dracula, the most powerful of all their kind.
• Dracula's entrance itself. It starts with a man getting kidnapped in the streets at night, taken into an abandoned building where a horde of vampires surround him. They look set to dine on the victim, only to hear something, immediately drop to the floor, and scurry away. Slowly, whatever drove them off approaches, but due to the use of Nothing Is Scarier we don't see it, instead we just hear it. The following scene builds up the horror. The terrified look on the victim's face, the revelation that he is in fact Renfield, the unseen nature of his tormentor... and the very last line of the episode where the horrifying entity gives its name: Dracula.
  • One of the swarming vampire minions gets right up in Renfield's personal space: licking his cheek (perilously close to his eye) and murmuring that he's 'pink with blood'. It is a supremely creepy prelude to what the boss-man himself must be like.
• Apparently vampires aren't opposed to cannibalism, as Dracula's violin-playing minion learns the hard way. The callous indifference with which Dracula orders his offspring to eat the guy is also unsettling, to say the least, and it serves as brutal confirmation that Dracula has very little compassion for even his own kind.
• Lucifer cowering in a corner at Dracula's arrival in "A Blade of Grass." If Satan is afraid of Dracula, that certainly doesn't bode well for Vanessa.
  • Dracula's deep laughter as he telepathically moves a chair and a bed across the room also counts.
• Ethan's father describing the massacre of the family by the Native Americans. What is particularly horrifying is that there is no visual representation of the event, just Brian Cox's haunted delivery and the power of the viewer's imagination.
• The immediate effects of Vanessa falling for Dracula certainly count. Ethan, Sir Malcolm, and Kaetenay arrive at the London docks, only to find the place almost empty, and the city shrouded in an eerie mist... and then they're greeted by a swarm of a thousand rats, all fleeing into the ocean from Dracula's presence within the city.
• The wave of toads that are coming up from the sewers in "Perpetual Night".
• The closest thing we see in the series to a divine counterpart to the vampires, demons, and witches is Ethan, the Lupus Dei. Y'know, a werewolf that slaughters whole families across London, children included.

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