Penny Dreadful is a new Showtime series, but it’s also the slang term for a type of serialized fictional literature back in the 1800s, where vampires and murderers reigned supreme, and all for naught but a penny. (My, how times have changed! Although you can still buy books for a penny, so long as you don’t mind paying $5 for shipping.)
Well, as to the Showtime series, I love horror stuff, and I love dark spooky photography, but when it’s too dark to see anything even at night with the lights out, you’re shooting with too little light. It’s nice for it to be scary, but when it’s too dark, it’s just disappointing and frustrating, because we can’t see anything.
But don’t let that stop you guys at Showtime from hiding everything in the dark. (Actually, I’m pretty sure the series is done shooting already anyway, so it’s probably too late to change it if it’s too dark throughout.) But you’ll keep us in the dark too when we can’t see what’s going on, and not everyone will be pleased.
Part of the problem here is that plasma-screen TVs have a glow in the surface of the screen even when it’s a black screen, so when it’s too dark to see with the lights on, we turn off the lights, and then the screen glows in the dark, and we still can’t see it well enough.
Penny Dreadful would be perfect for a movie theater, where dark projected images look best in pitch dark. But when it’s too dark for TV, it’s just too dark to see. And as a TV show, it was made for TV viewing, so it should consider what works best for TV. But maybe this is only a problem with the first episode? (I hope…)
(Hey, maybe they should make a horror series next called: “The Darkness”. Then they could just have it be a black screen the whole time, and everyone would imagine their worst fears. Hey, it worked for Val Lewton. And think of all the money they’d save on actors and effects and stuff! In fact, it wouldn’t look too much different from the scary parts of Penny Dreadful.)
