‘FEAR’: MTV’s Short-Lived ‘Blair Witch Project’
How about some throwback fun? Let’s wind the clocks and cameras back to the turn of the century, to when MTV still played music videos—a time when The Real World and Road Rules reigned supreme. As a culture, we had survived the digital scare of “Y2K”, only to find ourselves wracked by a different kind of techno fear: the murky, pixelated horror of the video footage.
This was the crux of MTV’s FEAR, one of their earliest and most successful reality shows that was terribly short-lived. I wouldn’t blame you if you’ve never heard of FEAR. The rest of us Gen Xers and Millennials who prided ourselves on being the MTV generation know this low-resolution frame by heart.
Six contestants (identified by a chosen color) are sent to investigate a “haunted” locale. There’s no film crew; cameras were set up surreptitiously, with body cams strapped across contestants’ chests as the main POV. All they have is a flashlight, a walkie-talkie, and a navigator on the other end to walk them through the dark. Whoever survives the two nights of escalating dares gets $5,000.
Also Read: ‘Horror In The High Desert’, Gary, And The Digital Queer Experience [The Lone Queer]
The look of FEAR is downright revolting. This was pre-HD, when early video cameras could barely shoot in the night. But that limitation became an unexpected hook. After all, the cardinal rule of horror is what you don’t see is always scarier. No high-res ghoul, demon, or creature will ever hold a candle to the enveloping darkness, black as pitch. Plus, it was reminiscent of the 1999 horror film sensation The Blair Witch Project.
Groan at the found footage craze all you want, some of us will NEVER forget The Blair Witch Project’s hysteria, conjured by a diabolically clever marketing campaign. The film’s official website contained faux interviews and police reports, details of the missing characters, and purported evidence of their fatal journey in the woods. It looked real enough and that was the point.
The tagline for FEAR could’ve been on the poster for The Blair Witch Project: “The people are real. The place is real. The fear is real.” The show uses tricks right out of the film’s playbook. A computer lays out the rules for the contestants, along with a map of the area and the dares they must complete. Before the night begins, they watch a documentary about the location’s urban legend, backed by “chilling testimonies” from locals, historians, and paranormal experts. This is where FEAR’s ghostly gimmicks and effects feel cheap, but this does not break the contract established in the tagline: “The people are real. The place is real…” The stories, clearly, are not. But try telling that to the contestants in the dark.
Also Read: The Best Found Footage Of 2023
The haunts they’re sent into look eerily similar to the derelict house at the end of The Blair Witch Project—though I suppose any structure looks terrifying through infrared lenses. The camera gear at their disposal is also the type of DIY filmmaking that would make Heather Donahue proud. FEAR’s look and premise felt so much like a continuation of the found footage classic in TV form that it kinda stole the thunder from Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, which not only came out the same year, but also dispensed with any illusions of being “real”. For many, FEAR functioned as the true Blair Witch sequel because it picked up the stick figure baton.
Credit where credit is due. FEAR might’ve arrived in the wake of The Blair Witch Project, but in this excellent oral history, the show’s creators cite The Legend of Hell House as inspiration. In John Hough’s 1973 film, a paranormal research group investigates the haunt of a sadist and murderer, where another group of researchers died 20 years prior (in other words, the ideal tone-setter). There’s no denying FEAR takes cues from horror movies, right down to its selection of contestants. The six would be comprised of The Jock, The Partyer, Stoner, Weirdo, etc. Though this was unscripted, part of the show’s satisfaction was the subversions of these horror movie archetypes. Sometimes the jock is the first to wimp out. Other times there wouldn’t be a final girl.
Also Read: Found Footage Aliens and Depraved Killers in ‘Split Screen’ [New Blood Reviews]
FEAR is the perfect title, though the show could’ve been called, “Dares in the Dark”. Some contestants are dared to sit in an electric chair, or stay in an attic in complete radio silence, or make contact with a spirit by performing a seance. The ghost stories didn’t matter; it was the creepy atmosphere that got the job done. The best way to understand how this fiendish concoction worked is by looking at the show’s best episode: the Season 2 opener, “Mina Dos Estrellas Part 1”.
In “Mina Dos Estrellas Part 1”, the contestants are sent to a mine in Mexico said to be terrorized by the Nahual, a werewolf/shape-shifting creature. On the first dare, team member GREEN is instructed to head to the chapel and knock down a giant cross. GREEN hesitates at the challenge, and his teammates in the safe house are right there with him. If you were a believer in any of this, then knocking down a cross is like knocking down your only defense.
Consider the scenario. He’s out there on his own—while it’s dark and stormy, mind you—with only a radio to communicate with his teammates. They just watched a documentary about a creature that supposedly haunts the place, and he’s plunged into total darkness right away where every creak of the roof and every snap of a branch may as well be the urban legend come true.
Also Read: ‘[REC]’ Reinvented What Found Footage Horror Could Be
This simple but effective scare tactic is exposed literally when team members head to each paranormal hotspot and the navigator relays additional ghost stories while they’re isolated in the dark. The show does this repeatedly and the trick always works as intended. A contestant may quit within seconds, or those stories will come back to haunt them on night two.
The next two contestants in “Mina Dos Estrellas Part 1” are eliminated in the second dare. WHITE is sent to the hospital with YELLOW as a safety. Their challenge is to lure the Nahual with a blood offering, but before the navigator can complete the instructions, WHITE backs down immediately followed by YELLOW. They both attest to the shared feeling that something was watching them, even if they won’t say it’s the Nahual. And this is the fun of FEAR. Seeing the contestant’s fear and how it fuels them to carry on or causes them to lose their shit.
The equipment, instructions, and comfort of each other’s flashlights are the only points of certainty they have in their isolation. When any one of those malfunctions, magic happens—or rather, fear. The most indelible moment in the episode is when the power goes out and the remaining team members don’t know what to do over the radio. (Whether this is due to the storm or some devilish puppeteering on MTV’s end is unaddressed.) Navigator PURPLE is the only one in the safe house while RED and BLUE are separated across the mine in the middle of their dares. For a brief moment, we’re concerned about PURPLE’s safety even though she’s in the safest place compared to her teammates. All three of them, regardless, are literally in the dark. They didn’t know it, but they quietly struck gold.
Also Read: ‘Hell House LLC’ Creator Stephen Cognetti On Creepy Clowns and Found Footage [Watch]
Fear isn’t just about running and screaming your lungs out. Fear amplifies us at our worst, or exposes how brave and confident we aren’t. Compare the enthusiasm at the beginning of “Mina Dos Estrellas Part 1” to the bitter end when the last contestant has his Heather Donahue moment. PURPLE had kicked off the dares saying, “Let’s be the first team to do it all.” They end up being the first team in the show’s history to not complete the challenges, hence the “Part 1” in the title.
Such is the lightning in a bottle that MTV captured with FEAR—a show that was undone by its own ambition. It costs to scout for locations, produce those faux documentaries, come up with and test the challenges for each episode, and fly in contestants. And, in the case of an episode like “Mina Dos Estrellas Part 1”, to fly in another set of contestants. The second season went international, causing the budget to balloon exponentially. That season wound up being its last.
By then, the show had left its ghost mark on television, spawning a wave of imitators. There were FEAR-inspired shows like Scariest Places on Earth, or FEAR-adjacent like Murder in Small Town X, plus a string of paranormal reality programming on the Travel Channel and A&E.
VH1 attempted a successor in the Celebrity Paranormal Project, but having primetime personalities who knew where the cameras were kinda popped the verisimilitude of the premise. A buncha unknowns venturing into the unknown—that’s the key to MTV’s found footage experiment. Sure, these twenty-somethings didn’t catch any ghosts on camera, but the indisputable frights on their faces are proof of FEAR’s wicked ingenuity and lasting cultural legacy: There was nothing to fear but fear itself.
Categorized:Editorials
