The Penny Dreadful or the Penny bloods were sensational stories published in weekly parts. Usually with an emphasis on the terrible and the fantastic and often inspired by gothic melodramas of the time, the bloods were an important feature of Victorian sub culture.
Though once prolific, these items and the stories within are now scarce. The subjects once familiar, are now (bar Sweeney Todd and Dick Turpin perhaps) all but forgotten. Characters like ‘Spring heel Jack’, once a household name, are now esoteric.
Cultures may change in time and place, but the roots of culture remain the same. Like any story they exist through their telling and the bloods are not the only legacy that has passed with a generation. Many folk stories and communal legends once integral to the fabric of a regional, and perhaps national, identity are being lost because they are simply not being passed from one generation to the next.
Carrion film seeks to redress that.
Each film will draw from neglected local legends and aspects of the early Penny Dreadful’s. Some, like the phantom coach of Okehampton castle, have been drawn from folk songs. Some were once part of a shared English mythology, such as ‘the Lambton worm’, but have since slipped into obscurity outside the region that spawned them.
The diversity of these tales lies testament to the richness of our folklore’s heritage.
These then are simply new ways to tell old tales… but they are tales worth telling.
‘Once upon a time…there were local legends and folk songs about monsters. There were execution chapbooks and there were penny dreadfuls…
For a century these stories have been all but forgotten….until now.’