Black Mirror has become the Twilight Zone of the 21st century, even though it doesn’t have any supernatural elements. Instead, the show has a reputation for being dark and scary because it extrapolates our own technology and social trends into the future. This is shown even more by the fact that the show’s creator, Charlie Booker, put it on indefinite hold because he thought the real world was becoming too similar to what the show showed.
Black Mirror has always been known for making people feel uncomfortable about technology, and sometimes it comes very close to being scary. Here is a list of the ten most scary Black Mirror episodes.
“Be Right Back”
“Be Right Back” combines the fear of losing a loved one with how scary it is that A.I. can seem human so quickly. In this episode, a young woman named Martha finds out that her boyfriend Ash died in a car accident. As part of her grieving process, she downloads an A.I. program that reads all of Ash’s texts, emails, and Facebook posts and then learns how to talk to her as if it were Ash. At first, it’s just texts, but as the A.I. gets better at copying his voice, it moves on to phone calls. Eventually, Martha buys a robot that looks like Ash and is controlled by the same A.I. that has been copying him so well. Even though the premise is based on AI, the episode’s subject matter and how it relates to grief and loss make it feel like a ghost story.
“Black Museum”
In the season four finale, Black Museum is a collection of three different stories told by a tour guide at a strange sideshow in the Utah desert. If “Be Right Back” is Black Mirror’s version of a ghost story, then “Black Museum” is three different ideas of hell. In the first story, a doctor has an implant that lets him feel his patients’ pain so he can diagnose them more accurately. The second story is about a woman who falls into a coma. To save her, her husband downloads her consciousness into his brain so that they can share his feelings. This leads to the third and final story. When museum owner Rolo Haynes takes his only tour participant into a curtained-off back room, he shows her a sentient hologram clone of Clayton Leigh, a man who was wrongly convicted of murder. Visitors can pull the lever on Clayton’s electric chair over and over again, and each time a new hologram in the form of a keychain pops out. This new hologram is always feeling the peak of the shock and is always aware of it.
“Crocodile”
“Crocodile” is a violent noir story that takes place 15 years after the main character, Mia, helps her friend Rob cover up a murder he did when he hit a biker with his car. Mia kills a lot of people to keep people from finding out about her past crimes, which makes her situation worse and worse, like a house of cards. Mia has to worry about both eyewitnesses to her crimes and the Recaller technology, which was introduced in season one’s The Entire History of You. With this technology, a private investigator can look into Mia’s memories to see if she remembers any of her past crimes.
“Hated in the Nation”
“Hated in the Nation” is about a series of strange and grisly murders that are linked to an online poll called “#DeathTo.” The person who is linked to the hashtag the most is found dead the next day. This brings together two very different fears: online harassment and surveillance in an ever-growing online world and environmental collapse. At the beginning of the episode, it is explained that bees are almost extinct, so a population of Autonomous Drone Insects (ADIs) has been made to pollinate plants. As detectives Karin Parke and Blue Coulson find out that the government gave the ADIs facial recognition software so they could spy on their citizens and that whoever started the #DeathTo trend hacked the ADIs to kill each day’s most tagged person in a brutal way, they realize that the government gave the ADIs facial recognition software so they could spy on their citizens.
“Men Against Fire”
“Men Against Fire” is about a war in the future where soldiers are given a special augmented reality neural implant to help them fight against monsters called “Roaches” that are pale and have sharp teeth. When Stripe Koinange and his team find a farmhouse full of Roaches, they get into a fight that damages Stripe’s neural implant. Over the next few missions, Stripe starts to realize that his implant was doing more than just adding mission blueprints. Stripe finds out that the Roaches they have been killing with no mercy are just normal people that his neural implant has been making look like ugly mutants to hide how horrible what he has been doing has been.
“Metalhead”
“Metalhead” plays on the fear that most people already have about the Boston Dynamics robots and what would happen if they had guns. In Metalhead, human society has fallen apart, and killer robots called “Dogs” are free to kill any humans they find. Our main character, Bella, and a few other survivors are looking for supplies in a warehouse when they run into a couple of these Dogs, who attack them right away. It’s not clear why the Dogs attack humans as soon as they see them. They may have become intelligent and want to kill all humans, or their A.I. may have a bug that makes every human a target. No matter what, the Dogs are very dangerous and hard to kill or even get away from. The whole episode is shot in black and white, which gives it an old-school horror feel and a grimness that matches the grimness of the story.
“Playtest”
“Playtest” is about an American gamer named Cooper who travels the world to test a new and advanced augmented reality game that is designed to learn your worst fears and use them to create a unique horror experience for the player. Cooper was given an earpiece so he could talk to the real world while he was in the game, but it stopped working once he went into the game. From there, the episode almost stops being a Black Mirror episode and becomes a fire hose of psychological horror stimuli that makes Cooper, and by extension the audience, wonder how much of this is actually part of the game and how much of it seems to be a glitch in the game.
“Shut Up and Dance”
In “Shut Up and Dance,” a high school student named Kenny gets a computer virus that gives hackers access to his webcam and lets them record a video of him masturbating. The hackers then threaten to show the video to Kenny’s friends and family if he doesn’t do a series of increasingly strange crimes. Even though the episode isn’t as scary as a horror movie, it is scary to see the fear on a kid’s face as he tries desperately to stop this hacker from hurting him.
“USS Callister”
At first, “USS Callister,” the first episode of Star Trek’s fourth season, seems like it might be a joke about Star Trek. But it quickly turns into the story of a person who kidnaps people over and over again. In this episode, Robert Daly, a programmer and video game designer, is able to make sentient clones of his coworkers and put them in a video game about exploring space. He plays the role of the captain, and the rest of his coworkers are forced to play his bridge crew. His real coworkers don’t know any of this is going on, but the clones Daly makes have all the knowledge and memories of their original selves. In a way, it’s like Daly takes his coworkers hostage and makes them play Star Trek with him. Daly also gets a sadistic thrill out of punishing people who don’t want to play along with the game. He does things like take a crew member’s face off as a punishment.
“White Bear”
A woman without a name wakes up in an empty house and has no idea who she is or where she is. As she tries to figure out where she is, people are filming her with their phones and won’t help her or even talk to her while a masked man with a shotgun tries to shoot her. The woman meets another man who doesn’t seem to be affected by whatever is going on. He tells her that it seems like everyone else is being controlled by a TV signal except for the two of them. What starts out as a twist on the zombie apocalypse genre similar to Stephen King’s Cell, it turns out that the whole thing has been staged and that the woman is actually a murderer serving her sentence in a place called White Bear Justice Park, where she relives the same survival horror scenario with her memory wiped each time in front of a live audience.
