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The big whole idea of Peaky Blinders was always that it mashed up your British period drama with your American Western. Sometimes it was more of a period drama; sometimes it was more of a Western. But it was always somewhere on a continuum between the two.
However, judging by episode two of season six it’s looking more and more like Peaky Blinders will sign off for good as a horror movie.
Of course, it’s always been a ghost story. Tommy and Arthur Shelby were ghouls from the beginning, men whose souls died in the mud and muck of France. But the gears have definitely shifted now. The call is coming from inside the house.
Let’s look at the evidence. First off: young Ruby. Tommy and Lizzie’s daughter might be all sweetness and light most of the time, but lately she’s turned into Linda Blair from The Exorcist to the power of Damien from The Omen.
Lizzie discovers page after page of horrific drawings – shapeless, nameless horrors with hungry mouths and gaping eyes – presumably drawn by her.
Have the Shelbys never seen Insidious? The Others? Children of the Corn? The Ring? That extremely shit Doctor Who episode set during the Olympics? A kid drawing a nameless demon face is the point at which you pack a bag, nail the front door shut and call in the Ghostbusters.
Then, as Lizzie goes to find out what’s going on, she finds her daughter sitting on her own, facing away from her.
“I can hear voices,” Ruby says, Sixth Sense-ly. “Coming from up the chimney.”
The strings climb and screech. Ruby’s also having premonitions and visions of a grey man who might be a vision Tommy keeps having of a man he killed in the trenches. But she says he’s coming for her.
And Tommy’s not the only one having seizures, remember. Lizzie explained in the first episode that Ruby "kept saying these gypsy words, 'tickna mora… tickna mora o'beng, o'beng' over and over".
That bit of Romani roughly translates, according to Steven Knight, as “devil”.
"It means a bit more than that, but yeah,” he told Digital Spy. “So it's not good. It's not a good thing."
You don’t say. The pivot to horror in episode two suggests that we’re in for a very different kind of finale to the seasons which have gone before. Peaky Blinders has tended to go either for an all-guns-blazing shootout (season four) or a slow-burn face-off (season one, season two, season three).
As much as he’s fighting Mosley and Michael, it feels like this time around, Tommy will be fighting himself more than ever. Returning to the start, to the trauma which stands as the only thing Tommy can’t outrun or outgun, would be an apt ending.
Oh, and the other thing about horror movies: the kid usually makes it. But the kid’s dad rarely does.
