‘Widow’s Bay’ Just Released the Most Chillingly Playful Episode 9 Promo Art of the Season, Featuring a Card Game Called ‘RUN’
Apple TV’s ‘Widow’s Bay’ is a ten-episode horror-comedy created by Katie Dippold and directed by Emmy Award winner Hiro Murai, starring Matthew Rhys as Tom Loftis, a mayor determined to modernize a remote New England island that may or may not be living under an ancient curse. The island sits about 40 miles off the coast, and the show’s central tension pivots on a community that has spent generations keeping outsiders away, quietly accepting the supernatural as part of daily island life.
Since its April premiere, ‘Widow’s Bay’ has been met with near-unanimous critical acclaim, currently holding a 97% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes with reviewers consistently praising its performances, writing, and its precise tonal balance between horror and comedy. The series has also proven itself willing to shift genre entirely from one week to the next, with Episode 8 marking an unexpected full-on slasher outing that caught even dedicated fans off guard.
Fresh promotional images have now arrived for the penultimate chapter, and they are doing exactly what this show does best: unsettling the viewer while barely raising its voice. The images feature what appears to be an in-world card game called ‘RUN,’ illustrated with a sprinting hare against a starburst background and labeled as an action card game for two to six players. It is the kind of beautifully dry, horror-adjacent prop design that has become a signature of the series.
The official episode description leans into that same sardonic calm, inviting residents to seek shelter as a centuries-old storm threatens to engulf the island in darkness, and then cheerfully suggesting they enjoy a card game in the meantime. Following the chaos of Episode 8, the storm is expected to knock out power and ground ferries entirely, effectively trapping the surviving cast in a tense island lockdown with nowhere left to go.
The episode, titled ‘Emergency Shelter,’ arrives on June 10 exclusively on Apple TV. It is directed by Hiro Murai himself, who also helms the season finale on June 17, making him the guiding hand for both the show’s closing chapters. Having Murai steer the series home carries weight, given how much his visual and tonal instincts have shaped everything that came before it.
In an interview with IndieWire, Dippold reflected on the scale of the response, describing it as unlike anything she has experienced in her career, and crediting ‘Atlanta’ as a key creative reference for the show’s willingness to pivot dramatically in tone and genre from one episode to the next. She has spoken about how the creative passion behind a project like this comes into sharpest focus once the ego steps out of the way, framing the willingness to take big swings as both a professional philosophy and a deeply personal one.
With only two episodes remaining in the first season and an island full of unanswered questions, the arrival of a promo card game called ‘RUN’ feels less like marketing and more like a very pointed message from the show’s creative team. Whether the card game itself plays a role in the episode or simply serves as the world’s most anxiety-inducing piece of merchandise, it raises a question worth putting to every fan who has made it this far: what do you think is actually waiting for the residents of ‘Widow’s Bay’ when the storm finally hits and the lights go out?
