Cult SA sci-fi series Room 9' unleashes Zulu vampires and tokoloshes

The second episode of groundbreaking South African TV sci-fi series Room 9 is currently being screened on The Africa Channel on Monday nights. It's set in the post apocalyptic future known as the New Azania after a cataclysmic event reduced this world into a wasteland.

An oddball paranormal and occult unit in the New Azanian Police Department (NAPD) wages a war against supernatural forces such as the tokoloshe, Zulu vampires, mermaids and a host of other scary African legends.

Young, sexy and driven Alice Kunene played by upcoming actress Zethu Dhlomo is recruited to join seasoned demon slayer Gabriel Harkness embodied by veteran actor David Butler. Alice is unaware what her job entails. Her brutal awakening catapults her into hair raising battles with poltergeists, zombies, aliens, demons and other myths. Her indoctrination into the NAPD is completed by blind researcher Ruby Prins (Angela Ludek), who's endowed with foresight powers; and Nigerian expert on paranormal matters, voodoo guru Solomon Onyegu, portrayed by Anthony Oseyemi of Holby City and The Bill fame.

Room 9 was created by Darrell Roodt, famous for big screen offerings such as Sarafina and Cry the Beloved Country; he's currently working on the biopic of Winnie Mandela. His talent is complemented by head writer and director Athos Kyriakides who haswritten for TV series such as Scandal currently on The Africa Channel; he also worked on a range of acclaimed international films, including Being John Malkovich, Topsy Turvy, The Idiots and The Apostle. We spoke to Kyriakides to get the lowdown on Room 9.

Where did the inspiration for Room 9 come from?

Darrell Roodt (director and writer) and two of his colleagues Michael Swan and Ivan Milburrow were inspired by this detective from apartheid days: there used to be this department in the police service that dealt with the occult and supernatural cases like the X-Files division in the US. We started developing characters around the notion that it's the new South Africa which we called New Azania. It was eight years into the future; it was 2020. That world was almost post apocalyptic: a big cataclysmic event happened in 2013 which changed the country for ever. You get to find out what happened eight years ago during the course of the season because it goes backwards. That is the world we set it in.

How did you get involved in this project?

I previously worked with the production company Dv8 Films on another TV show before we did Room 9 as head writer and director. It was called Mshika-shika which was on M-NETs' Mzansi Magic. It's a crime drama in the vein of HBO's The Wire, but obviously in a South African context. And so I had worked with them on that show and on a number of other productions. They asked me if I wanted to get involved. I immediately jumped at it because I love science fiction as a genre. And it was a challenge to try and make it work in South Africa.

How did your previous writing experience prepare you?

I've been working as a writer for the last 13 years. I started out as a script editor and then moved onto writing weekly drama like Tsha Tsha on SABC1. I ended up writing the soapie drama Scandal on E-TV. I wrote more than 150 episodes of Scandal over three and a half years. It grooms you to become a better writer because you're delivering an episode a week. You're story-lining and its 24/7. You have to keep audiences entertained and its daily drama. That was the best training I could have had to be a better writer. A lot of the best writing experience you can get is working on soaps because of that relentlessness. Watching big television shows over the last ten years inspired me as a writer as well. Television is becoming a platform that's regarded the same as film nowadays. A lot of TV shows are now better than films. And you get to spend more time with these characters. All of that contributed to help me get a bird's eye view of the series from episode one to thirteen, and how the characters grow and change over those episodes.

What challenges did you face in making the show?

We didn't have a huge budget for what we were trying to do. We didn't have a visual effects budget. If you look at it, it's probably a thousandth of the budget that a normal HBO American TV show would get. What was exciting was finding creative ways around our budgetary limitations which ended up making the episodes better. Each director was finding innovative ways to get around those budget problems. Credit to all the writers and directors because it doesn't end up feeling like a low budget television production. The production values are very high.

What kind of research did you conduct to understand the occult or paranormal?

We did quite a lot of field research. We met the head of this old apartheid occult unit who still practises. The police often call him in when there are cases without a physical explanation, or anything that is occult related. He was talking about some muti cases he's dealing with now all over the country, and just taking us through some of those old case files. We drew a lot from that. We also did a lot of research on African and South African legends like the tokoloshe or Zulu vampire. We try to take on thirteen African legends over the course of the first season. Once we did our research, we really tried to have fun with how we could scare audiences and get them to love the characters.

Did you visit any sangomas?

Some of our researchers went out and spoke to sangomas to try and create a character that was very real. There's a recurring sangoma character, Dr Dhladhla, in the show. We ended up bringing in a very controversial pastor who has his own church following and his own show on Soweto TV. His name is Pastor Mboro. He expressed an interest to be on the show as himself. We used his

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