Here's Where Nine Bodies in a Mexican Morgue Was Filmed

If you like your mystery thrillers sweaty and mean, BBC has a new one that practically drops you in the jungle and dares you to guess wrong. It is called 'Nine Bodies in a Mexican Morgue' and, yeah, that title is not subtle.

• Where to watch: Streaming now on BBC iPlayer, with episodes also airing on BBC One
• Premise: A light plane with 10 people goes down in the Mexican jungle. Nine survive. Then the survivors start dying, one by one. Someone is making sure they do not all make it out.
• Creator: Anthony Horowitz (novelist and screenwriter, master of twisty stuff)
• Cast: Led by Eric McCormack, with Siobhan McSweeney (Derry Girls) and David Ajala (Star Trek: Discovery) among the ensemble
• Not actually filmed in Mexico: The jungle was built on Gran Canaria in the Canary Islands (Spanish territory off the northwest coast of Africa)
• Production timeline: Shot in 2024

Wait, is it out now or soon?

The BBC is doing the classic double rollout: it is on iPlayer now, while episodes are landing on BBC One. The schedule also flags a Saturday 27 September start on BBC One. Yes, that is a little confusing, but the bottom line is you can stream it already and catch the weekly drops on broadcast.

The hook

Ten people go down in a small plane. Nine of them initially make it. From there, it is a whodunnit under survival pressure: dwindling food and water, lots of mistrust, and a body count that keeps climbing. It is exactly the kind of puzzle-box Horowitz likes to build, so expect reversals and reveals right up to the end.

About that 'Mexican jungle'...

Despite the title, nobody went to Mexico. The production recreated a dense, sweltering jungle on Gran Canaria, mixing location work with a purpose-built set inside the island's large studios. If that sounds like an inside-baseball flex, it kind of is. The crew basically grew a micro-jungle from scratch.

Siobhan McSweeney told the BBC that the set literally came alive by the end of the shoot and called it a perfect storm for her: the genre she loves, scripts that kept flipping the story, and, honestly, the chance to shoot somewhere warm instead of her usual Northern Ireland haunts.

"They've got these huge studios and they built that jungle there. By the end of the shoot, it was alive. They did an extraordinary job."

Eric McCormack told US Weekly the same thing from another angle: the island is volcanic, not tropical, so what you see is an engineered ecosystem that went rogue in the best way. The bugs were real, the claustrophobia was real, and they spent six weeks just inside that studio build to let the cabin-fever vibe sink in.

"Very quickly, it became its own ecosystem. Bugs were crawling on us... It started to feel more and more real. We chopped six weeks alone just in the studio so the feeling of being trapped in the middle of nowhere started to really happen, except at 6 o'clock the bell would ring and we'd go have Spanish food."

Bottom line

If you want a pulpy survival mystery with a nasty streak and legit production nerdery behind the scenes, this one is worth the click. It looks like Mexico, it is actually Gran Canaria, and it is engineered to mess with you all the way to the final frame.