The Cutprice Guignol

If there’s one good thing about the current culture of constant surveillance we’re all trapped in, it’s that it offers a lot of great opportunities for found footage horror.

And, if you know me, you’ll know that I value found footage horror above everything else in the world (well, apart from the cats). Which means I was pretty much predisposed to enjoy this particular episode of Inside No. 9 from the moment I heard about it; Mulberry Close follows a couple, Declan (Shearsmith) and Liv (Vinette Robinson, Rosa Parks from Doctor Who’s fantastic episode Rosa) move into a new neighbourhood, and find themselves the locus of local curtain-twitching thanks to their novel neighbours (Pemberton, Adrian Scarborough, and Dorothy Atkinson). The found footage element to the story comes courtesy of a security camera mounted at the front door of the new couple’s property, and, after last week’s marginally disappointing episode, I was ready for something I could really get my horrible little fangs into.

And God, as a piece of found footage horror, this story doesn’t disappoint. It’s a really ambitious take on the genre, with the vast majority of the episode taking place in the single, static frame of the ring camera mounted beside the front door of the titular number 9. Those limitations force a real creativity with the storytelling here, the sound of multiple bottles crashing into a recycling bin off-screen to introduce Damon’s alcoholism, the strangled squeal of a dog beneath a car’s wheels in the episode’s dénouement, lending the episode a Rear Window-esque feel of only catching tiny pieces of the real story and piecing it together into a narrative we can make sense of.. Like all great horror, it’s what we don’t see here that’s the most disturbing, those final moments of Adrian Scarborough stalking into the house with a brick in hand more unsettling than any gory head-bashing could be (and trust me when I say I’ve seen a few).

And I think Mulberry Close makes great use of the found footage storytelling device to craft a kind of meta-narrative about what happens behind closed doors in relationships; the camera points outward for nearly the entire runtime of this episode, leaving us with only glimpses of the dysfunction between Damon and Liv that are contained inside the house. I loved that idea of, as an audience, being in the same place as the neighbours, only seeing the public face of this couple – aside from the small flashes of their true dysfunction that spill over from the confines of their home.

Aside from found footage, something I’m always drawn to in my fiction is small communities. I think that hyper-focused intensity that comes from a small number of people in close contact with each other for a long time is something that can be nudged into so many different genres in really interesting ways – from This Country and comedy, to The Burning Girls and drama, to Candle Cove and horror, small communities are a rich backdrop for great storytelling, especially in shortform settings like Inside No. 9. And, to be quite honest, I think this episode straddles all of the genres I quoted above and more; the small community of Mulberry Close are beautifully-drawn, allowing this growing sense of paranoia and suspicion to bloom in a way that makes sense. As much as it’s an exceptionally funny episode (Dorothy Atkinson’s venomously passive-aggressive performance being the standout in those stakes for me), in that deliciously blackly-comic way Shearsmith and Pemberton’s work so often is, it captures that insular, oppressive feeling that anyone who’s spent any time in a community like this one can relate to, and that’s impressive given the limit scale of the storytelling device here.

Mulberry Close is truly just a really brilliant episode of Inside No. 9; an inventive take on the found footage genre, a story of insular communities and relationship dysfunction, with just a smattering of true crime piss-taking dabbled on at the end for fun. This far into the run of the show, it feels like Pemberton and Shearsmith have totally settled as writers within this format, and Mulberry Close is a great example of that – confident, experimental, and controlled, it is a tiny little horror masterpiece.

If you liked this article and want to see more stuff like it, please check out the rest of my Inside No. 9 reviews. I’d also love it if you would check out my horrible short story collection, and, if you’d like to support my work, please consider supporting me on Patreon!

(header image via BBC)