Black Mirror Season 6 came out just a few days ago and many are commenting the show for an exceptionally written series. Despite the long wait, the show's return to the screen proved to be worth it.
One of the episodes that stood out is the last one, episode 5. When Netflix first teased the episodes, it revealed that this episode was a Red Mirror production.
Now that we know what a Red Mirror is, we can't help but wonder: Black Mirror: is Demon 79 scary? If you haven't watched the episode yet, this article will help guide you if it is something worth watching.
Is Demon 79 a Scary Episode?
Although Demon 79 is a supernatural horror, it's not really a scary episode that you should avoid. Unlike the other Black Mirror episodes, this episode does not make use of any technology.
The episode follows Nida (played by Anjana Vasan) who is a quiet sales assistant in Northern England set in 1979.
She experiences racism and misogyny almost on a daily basis at her workplace and her day-to-day life. To get through her work day, daydreams of what it's like to murder the people who irk her off.
After her co-worker complained about the Biryani smell in their break room, Nida has no choice but to eat her lunch in the basement of the store.
Once there, Nida finds a talisman that releases a demon when she gets home. The demon appears to her as a sight she enjoys, the dancing man from a TV show she watches.
The demon introduce himself as Gaap (played by Paapa Essiedu) and tells Nida she has to kill three people over the next three days or it will be the end of the world.
What follows next is Nida's struggle to find her victims, as she isn't convinced that the end of the world is coming at all.
But after letting her see a vision of what's to come, Nida reluctantly obliges. She settles for killing people who have gotten away with some crime.
In the end, however, she is unable to complete her mission. But after befriending Gaap, he invites her to go with him to eternal damnation. She agrees and the two leave.
Why Is It a Red Mirror Production?
In an interview, show creator Charlie Brooker shared that Demon 79 is a Red Mirror production instead of a Black Mirror.
"I started this season with a Red Mirror story, Demon 79, which was set in the past. The idea [with the Red Mirror label] was to do an alternative horror companion to Black Mirror. But Demon 79 links back to regular Black Mirror episodes near the end. That made me think, yeah, I can do episodes [set] in the past, so why am I locking myself into setting things in a future with lots of chrome and glass and holograms? For the Beyond the Sea episode, I’ll set it in 1969. What would that look like? And incidentally, that’s quite exciting, because it feels like a sort of lost science fiction story of the 60s. And it means that the characters within it are behaving like people of their era, not of our era. Is there a term for that? Retrofuturistic? Psychedelic steampunk?
And then Mazey Day is set in the early noughties. That one, I flip flopped between making it a Red Mirror and a Black Mirror. And then I thought, F--k it, it is Black Mirror—because otherwise we were blowing the slightly outrageous twist that happens there. But again, I was just trying to experiment a bit with what Black Mirror was. I don’t want to sit here feeling like I’m in a box where I have to write an episode about NFTs or whatever’s on the tech pages today. That’s not what the show was ever intended to do. If you look at our first episode, you can tell it was obviously designed to be startling and surprising and weird. So I was trying to sort of reconnect a bit to that."
What’s in Store for Black Mirror?
While there's been no announcement on whether there'll be a Black Mirror Season 7, avid fans are already clamoring for one.
But according to Brooker, it's possible that he'll do "an animated episode or a musical episode" in the future since he hasn't done either of these.
With the introduction of Red Mirror, however, it's possible that Brooker will be expanding this genre and will be resetting the storyline of the show.
In his interview with RadioTimes, Brooker said:
"[Whether there’s more Red Mirror] depends what people make of it and how it gets received and this, that and the other… It was really really useful as a sort of refresh - a reset. When Black Mirror started, it was 2011 and at the time, there weren’t many shows that looked like it or there weren’t many shows where someone looked at a smartphone frankly, let alone obsessed over one and sat there staring at it until it ruined them. It felt like there’s quite a few shows with dystopian sci-fi technical themes."
It'll be interesting what he plans to do with the Red Mirror section. Now that we've got a demon and a werewolf story, could Brooker be planning something with other supernatural forces?
All five episodes of Black Mirror Season 6 are now available to stream on Netflix.
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