Inside No. 9 creators tease the final season’s episodes – from a Gothic period piece to one set in a horror-themed escape room

As one of BBC’s most thrilling shows comes to an end, the creators of Inside No. 9 -Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith - tease the series' final installment, explaining that although this season is quite dark, it won’t be 100% horror. “We’ve always enjoyed having a mixture within the series, so we wouldn’t make a full series that leaned into horror,” Pemberton tells SFX magazine in the new issue, which features Doctor Who on the cover. 

The anthology series starring the creators themselves, Whitechapel’s Pemberton and Saltburn’s Shearsmith, first premiered back in 2014 and has spanned over 8 seasons so far, each episode different in theme and subject, but all with a dark underlying tone. And it sounds like season 9 (a highly satisfying number to end on, to say the least) won't be any different as Pemberton gives us a taste of the upcoming episodes.

"Within this series, you could say 'Boo To A Goose' is really horrific. It’s not horror, but it’s tense. It’s got a great ’70s-sense brooding soundtrack to it. We’ve got an episode which is set in an escape room, and the escape room is horror-themed. So, that’s a quite nice and creepy episode." Pemberton continues: "We’ve got one which is a bit more Gothic, it’s a period piece, and it feels a bit like A Ghost Story For Christmas vibe to it. We’ve definitely enjoyed exploring all different kinds of storytelling devices and different genres as we have throughout the whole series."

That sounds pretty horror-heavy to us, but there is a trick to structuring the series so that it doesn't feel too dark all at once, as Shearsmith explains, "It’s quite telling when we were trying to put them in in order to just make them all feel different and not have so many dark and brooding and disturbing ones next to each other. We couldn’t do it,"

But it's better to end with a bang, right? Shearsmith goes on, laughing, "They’re all quite horrible. We’ve got a few lighter ones, but it was like, 'Oh, that’s quite relentless'. So, maybe that tells you something about the tone of the last series"

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Inside No. 9 season 9 releases on BBC Two and BBC iPlayer in May 2024. The above is just a snippet from our interview, available in the latest issue of SFX magazine, which features Doctor Who on the cover and is available on newsstands from Wednesday, April 17. 

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