(Continuing the series…)
Every once in a while, MTV tries to do something different in the realm of reality television. Like put a bunch of kids in a Winnebago and see if anything interesting happens. Or show how insane sweet sixteen parties have gotten. But a few years back, MTV tried to base a reality show on a reality movie. And the result of that effort, my friends, was Fear.
(Also known as, The Blair Witch Project but with worse acting)
Does anyone else remember this show? The premise was actually pretty cool. Take five 18-22 year olds and drop them off in a haunted location. Or at least some place that they said was haunted. Basically, you just needed a building with a lot of dark corners and plaster falling off of the walls. You had your paranormal experts explain in deadly serious voiceovers what happened in each location just to create that sense of “No human being should ever walk this piece of Earth again.” Of course the show consisted of sending the teenagers into these areas.
And they weren’t just sent into the haunted prison or ship or insane asylum. No, they had to carry this humongous camera on their back to give that grainy, headache inducing, Blair Witch style point of view shot. Including the camera shot looking straight back into their face for when they screamed. Which happened a lot. They even had to perform experiments, though I am still at a bit of a loss as to how they had apparatus that was tuned to detect hauntings. I mean, what is the base case that they are using here? Is there a place on the planet that is definitely not haunted? Over millions and millions of years, you’d think there would be the ghosts of dinosaurs everywhere at the very least.
At the end of the day, I still consider this one of the more interesting shows that MTV ever put together. There was no attempt to set the show up so that castmates would be trying to hook up every second of the way. It was a gameshow at heart (I think for going through everything you got five grand). But there was always this general level of creapiness that existed while watching the episodes. Like you never knew what was going to happen out there. That’s a pretty big accomplishment, creating a reality show that makes you suspend your belief in reality.
1 comment:
Fear was one of MTV's best shows. I read about production of the show. Actually, the cameras they used were very small and portable, and did not have a powered light source. Moreover, there was no camera/production crew on site - there were stationary cameras that were set up prior to the kids' arrival and all behind the scenes work was done remotely. these kids really were abandoned. They were on their own until someone either quit or the mission was completed. These mission sites were truly scary (e.g. the mental hospital, death row of a prison that had a sadistic warden, an old factory that had over 100 deaths in its heyday).
Some of the dares were deemed by the producers too creepy to actually have the kids do (e.g. standing in the hallway of death row and yelling to the ghosts "you are all going to die!"), and the crew who scouted and tested the sites before filming did often got creeped out themselves.
Some of the tasks that were borderline over the top were accomplished (e.g. being buried alive in a coffin, sitting in an electric chair.) but the Chupacabra mission in Mexico was never completed - everyone who tried completely freaked out - if I remember correctly one of the tasks was to be buried up to your neck in clay in the middle of a clearing and wait for the Chupacabra to hunt.
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