New TV Series with Muti Murders & Tokoloshe Hits SA Screens

South Africans will be tuning in to SABC1 tonight to watch Room 9, a ground-breaking post-apocalypse detective series, set in an alternate Pan-African world, where evil thrives and darkness rules. The 13-part series is set in the world’s only Occult Detective Unit!

The series falls into a similar genre to ‘Walking Dead’…but with a quintessential local flavour that is set to make it unmissable for South African audiences. Muti murders, the Tokoloshe, Poltergeists, Aliens and Vampires are all on the menu! Oh, and there’s even a mermaid. The stories are set in a specialised Police Occult Unit, led by young and ambitious detective Alice Kunene (Zethu Dlomo), and seasoned veteran Gabriel Harkness (David Butler). Together with their high tech team of detectives (referred to as the ‘Zombie Cops’ by other police divisions), they hunt down the perpetrators of evil, both in the world of the living and the dead. They work from a cavernous, dingy basement called Room 9. Viewers will notice that the episodes are set in an alternate, parallel world eerily familiar to our own, and in a city that could be Johannesburg or Kampala, Nairobi or Lagos, where a war is being waged between good and evil. According to the promotional material, this is the New Azania. The provinces as we once knew them in South Africa are no more. Instead this new world is divided into Sectors (see below for crucial rundown of each Sector).

The project is a collaboration between various leading South African writers and directors.

Renowned SA film director Darrell Roodt – best known for ‘Sarafina!’ (1992) – is involved in the project as a co-creator, writer and director. He enthuses that “when one watches all the exciting television shows being created, like WALKING DEAD or THE KILLING for example, this is, hopefully, our very own contribution to this format of telling great stories on television.” Roodt – who received an Oscar nomination for ‘Yesterday’ and recently directed a big-budget biopic of Winnie Mandela – has directed the first two episodes. He says that while “I’m hesitant to use words like ‘groundbreaking’ but, if we succeed with our vision, I think local audiences are going to really enjoy this and clamour for more! I hope it’s as much fun watching, as it is making the show!” The Sectors and What you Should Know:

• Sector 1 is the old Gauteng.
• Sector 2 is the old Limpopo, Mpumalanga, Free State and the North West.
• Sector 3 is parts of the old Northern Cape and Lesotho.
• Sector 4 is areas in the old Eastern and Western Cape.
• Sector 5 is the old Swaziland and places like Kwazulu Natal’s old Harrismith, Pietermaritzburg etc.
• Sector 6 is all of South Africa’s old coastal towns.

ROOM 9 premieres tonight at 20h30 on SABC1 Room 9 Official Website Follow Room 9 on Facebook Follow Room 9 on Twitter