The new drama from Sky, Penny Dreadful (Sky Atlantic, Tuesday, 9pm) has a swagger about it, a super-confidence, the swish and cockiness of a programme that thinks it's got it just right.

But anyone who has ever watched television or a film or read a book will be able to see through all that and spot the quivering nervousness at the heart of the programme.

Penny Dreadful has set out to scare us, but really it is a little bit scared itself.

What it's scared of is being different, and so this Victorian monster drama has included a little of everything in its set-up and execution: there is Hammer horror, Sherlock Holmes, Jane Eyre, Bram Stoker, Frankenstein, Dickens, James Bond, Nosferatu, The Matrix, CSI, Guy Ritchie, Saw and even the Western. It is a mash-up disguised as a work of originality; a greatest-hits compilation disguised as a new album.

This does not mean that the individual elements are bad because they're not.

Josh Hartnett is rather good as a wirey proto-cowboy and gun-for-hire, and Timothy Dalton is splendidly growly and grumpy as a monster-hunter called Sir Malcolm, although it is essentially an impersonation of Arthur Conan Doyle's Professor Challenger.

The rest of the cast is good too, especially Simon Russell Beale as the Egyptologist Dr Lyle, whose inappropriate boyish curls and predatorial lisp are among the creepiest elements of the episode.

The plot has a lot of potential too, especially the idea of the creature from the demimonde that, thanks to an autopsy that doesn't spare the sound effects, is revealed to have Egyptian hieroglyphics under its skin.

It is a striking image and one of many in the first episode that are likely to linger in your brain: the blood brimming in a tea cup, the beetles emerging from a crucifix and spreading across a wall, the spider reeling up on the end of a woman's finger as if issuing a command.

All of this will no doubt delight horror fans as well as giving them a slight nagging feeling of deja vu.

But, in a way, that is the point of Penny Dreadful: like the horror novel Pride And Prejudice And Zombies and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, the comic book that features a super-team of fictional characters, it tries to find originality in familiarity and features some of the stars of great Victorian gothic horror, most notably Victor Frankenstein who pops up at the end.

The Frankenstein story has always been homoerotic but Penny Dreadful drags the subtext to the surface in a scene in which Victor and his naked monster stare adoringly at each other like two men spotting each other for the first time in a gay nightclub.

It all teeters on the edge of silly -as all horror stories do - before pulling back from the edge.

And in the end does it work? Yes, because it's ghoulish and histrionic and there is nothing quite like the combination of gentility and horror.

This is gentlemanly horror. It is murder committed in a top hat, it is the wheels of a hansom cab running over the blood of another victim; it is what would happen if Dickens and Stoker collaborated on a comic book.

It is familiar and derivative, but there is enough of a twist on the familiar path to keep us interested, horrified and unsettled.