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The new Black Mirror episode 'Metalhead' is about as stripped back as Charlie Brooker's chilling anthology series gets.
With minimal cast and hardly any dialogue, the black-and-white thriller spans just 38 minutes and sees a woman (Maxine Peake) mercilessly hunted by a robot dog.
But Brooker has revealed that he originally planned for the episode to be even more sparse and stripped back, with no dialogue at all.
"Could we do a story with no dialogue at all? That was the first thought," he revealed.
"Partly, the beauty of doing an anthology show is that you get to reinvent the show with every episode, and so I guess as a sort of challenge, or in an attempt to keep it interesting for myself, it was interesting to see [if we could do it].
"Now, I didn't manage to have no dialogue in it whatsoever, but that was the original thought. Something very simple and nightmarish."
Black Mirror producer Annabel Jones added that the impetus for 'Metalhead' was to create an episode "with a very simple story" which offered "unrelenting tension".
"I think it's important when you do an anthology that all of the individual films have their own aesthetic," said Jones. "So we wanted a very minimalist, pared-back, brutal world and [director] David Slade (Hannibal, 30 Days of Night) is obviously your go-to person for that."
It was Slade's suggestion, too, for the episode to be monochrome. "People have suggested black-and-white episode to us before, and we nearly did it once," Brooker revealed. "But it just made sense for the starkness of the story. It makes the whole thing a bit more horror movie – it's a bit like Psycho or something."
'Metalhead' and the entire fourth season of Black Mirror are available to watch now on Netflix.
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