The single most terrifying piece of film I have ever seen is Black Mirror.

Okay, yes, Black Mirror is a TV Show, but sometimes we have to switch it up. Also to say some shows aren’t pieces of cinematic art would be an insult. For me, cinematic art isn’t just about movies, it’s about visual art that expresses itself in a cinematically pleasing way, which is what many other shows like Game of Thrones and Stranger Things have accomplished. These shows are presenting themselves as mini-movies and they deserve just as much recognition as films.

Black Mirror is one of these beautifully and cinematically crafted shows. It has invented a new kind of horror. It is modern and advanced and incredibly too real. It’s depictions of ourselves.

Black Mirror attempts to show that what people are becoming because the invention of social networking and other kinds of technology is the real horror story. While the episodes may sometimes be far-fetched and ludicrous, they aren’t exactly far from the truth.

I watched an episode of Black Mirror in my high school English class. I mean seriously, when a Netflix Original makes it into a high school curriculum, you know there is something special about it. The episode was called “Nosedive” and the premise of it was about how a woman goes insane because of her ratings and social media likes. Ratings work as a caste system and determine your worth, what you can or cannot purchase, and who you get to socialize with. This episode seemed crazy, yet this obsession with likes and ratings is far too present in our lives.

This show predicts how far one may go for the sake of social media, technology, and their own desires. The first episode of the series was about how the Prime Minister of England had to commit bestiality in order to save a royal. The entire episode thrives on the suspense coming from the common people who are about to witness this soon to be viral affair.  So needless to say, this show is not shy in its content. In another episode, called “Play Test”, a man literally dies as a side effect of his cell phone and his desire to get more money. He ends up in a nightmarish dream cycle that had me feeling as if I were in his nightmare. 

These episodes are, quite frankly, trippy and brain melting enough to make your head hurt after watching it. Black Mirror has such an intense effect on its viewers, something that not many filmmakers can even accomplish. This show, despite not being a film, has some of the best filmmaking I have seen in my entire life. Good filmmaking makes your audiences think about their own actions in result to what they have seen and that is exactly what Black Mirror does to its audience. Not only does it accomplish that, the storylines, characters, and cinematography are beautiful and feel like they are actually feature length films.

Black Mirror has sparked a new, hyper aware way of making cinematic art that reflects what our lives accurately look like, or will soon become.