10 Horror TV Shows That Broke All The Rules
7. Inside Number 9 - Breaking The Audience’s Trust
With its main gimmick being that every episode ends on an unpredictable twist, Inside Number 9 repeatedly breaks the unspoken agreement of trust between show and audience. We think that a show owes us transparency, that it will stick to its apparent genre or tone even if its internal contents changes - with this show, you can’t be so sure.
The best example of this was the show’s iconic ‘live’ episode. Back in 2018, the show was due to broadcast live on the BBC. The episode started normally but within a few minutes the audio cut out, there were a few glitches and then suddenly the BBC technical issues card appeared, and it was explained that due to some difficulties an old episode would air in its place.
Facing what appeared to be a badly-prepared bit of telly, one in five of the million live viewers changed channel to watch something else - but they would come to regret it. In a feat of event television, through a mix of live studio footage and pre-prepared haunting goodness, the show's creators Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton kicked down the fourth wall and involved viewers in a ‘live haunting’ of Granada studios.
The seed had been planted in the weeks before through newspaper articles about hauntings stopping work on sets. That, combined with the expected BBC error rigmarole and the actors’ incredibly smart Twitter participation, left audiences on the edge of their seat as what they believed was a fun episode of their favourite twisted drama turned into a Halloween haunting nightmare.
Watching it in retrospect can’t do it justice really, but if you get the chance it’s worth giving it a look over just to see how it's done.