'Black Mirror's 'Demon 79' pays homage to early Stephen King book

Although the new Black Mirror has plenty of mind-bending sci-fi in episodes like "Joan Is Awful" and "Beyond the Sea", there's also a healthy dose of horror in there too.

"Demon 79", with its story of a woman summoning a demon that demands human sacrifices to prevent the apocalypse, falls firmly into this category — and to make the genre even clearer, there's even a pretty big Stephen King nod at the heart of the tale.

What happens in Black Mirror's "Demon 79"?

The story follows Nida (Anjana Vasan), a sales assistant in a 1979 North England shoe shop, amid the rise of Britain's far-right fascist National Front. Nida's life is upturned when she finds a talisman that summons a demon called Gaap (Paapa Essiedu), who informs her she needs to kill three people in order to prevent the apocalypse. To encourage and assist her, Gaap gives Nida glimpses into the past and future lives of her potential victims.

Key to the story's end is white supremacist, Conservative politician Michael Smart (David Sheilds), who Nida first sees speaking at a rally before he comes into the store in the episode. After overhearing a racist conversation between him and her colleague Vicky (Katherine Rose Morley), Nida tells a reluctant Gaap to show her Smart's future. The result? He's destined to be ousted by the Conservatives for racism, only to go on and set up his own "Britannia" party that will lead to his election as Britain's prime minister and see him responsible (in Gaap's words) "for an impressive number of really juicy deaths".

In order to put a stop to Smart, Nida decides to make him her third and final victim.

What happens in Stephen King's The Dead Zone?

In Stephen King's 1979 novel The Dead Zone, meanwhile, a man called Johnny Smith wakes from a four-year coma to find he can predict the future by touching people. After he comes into contact with ruthless, populist politician Greg Stillson, he makes a horrifying discovery: Stillson is destined to one day become president and bring about the collapse of society.

Horrified by this vision, Johnny sets out to kill Stillson in order to stop him from fulfilling his terrible destiny — just like Nida does in "Demon 79".

How similar is "Demon 79" to The Dead Zone?

OK, so if you compared the plots of the two stories side by side, they wouldn't seem that similar. There's no demon in The Dead Zone, for instance, and in both stories the politician characters are just one part of a larger tale. But the similarities are still there, and the devil is in the detail. Obviously you've got the visions of a right wing politician at the beginning of their career who will go on to do terrible things, and the main character determined to kill them in order to stop it. But there's even a moment in "Demon 79" that feels like it might be a direct nod to King's work.

Gaap, flustered and wanting to stop Nida from going after Smart, whispers to her in the changing room of the shoe shop that "he killed a dog with a rock when he was 12." It's eerily similar to the background of Stillson's character in The Dead Zone. In the novel, the first time we see Stillson is when he's still working as a door-to-door salesman. In one disturbing sequence, when visiting the farmhouse of a possible client who turns out not to be home, Stillson kicks their dog to death after it attacks him.

Two right wing politicians who will go on to be the leaders of their countries and cause widespread death and destruction, who can only be stopped by a person capable of seeing the future, and who just so happen to have killed dogs when they were younger? That can't just be a coincidence.

How to watch: Black Mirror Season 6 is now on Netflix.