Sitting in a lit room, slim Jim from Boston hams it up for the camera like the Macho Man hawking beef jerky, blustering about being “ready to go find some ghosts!” Yet soon the 24-year-old’s braggadocio will go limp: Jim will be in a dark, abandoned psych ward, having been strapped into a straitjacket and blinded by a pillowcase tied around his neck (about which he’ll later squeak, “The second they put that thing on my head, I almost lost it”). And much later — after schlepping through tunnels of black, scraping encrusted blood off a hospital floor, and crying out during a ouija-boarded séance, “Oh God, what is happening to me?” — Jim will write about the whole experience’s psychological residual in a chat room: “When I got home to Boston none of my friends were at home. I actually drove to New York to be with a friend, I was so freaked out.”

That’s the evolution of MTV’s Fear, an hour-long game show that debuted last fall and reappeared mid February as an eight-episode series. Airing Sunday nights at 8 as a primer to Jackass, Fear abducts five or six willing 18-to-24-year-olds for the weekend, foists them onto a creaky, corroded, and supposedly ‘haunted’ locale, and challenges them to meet a series of dares over the course of two nights, for a reward of $5000 per person. As the text at the beginning of each episode whispers, “They record their own experiences. There is no film crew. They are alone.”

Like its pseudo-reality/televised gaming brethren, Fear squeezes its “real” people until they splat: some puke, some cry, others completely lose their shit. But unlike, say, Fox’s Temptation Island, Fear doesn’t fumble with awkward episodes (of big pimpin’, body shots, or lame stripteases) before exhuming any screaming meemies (or in TI’s case, a frantic Mandy). No, Fear goads its little lab mice into screeching uncontrollably, bunching up their faces in harpy anguish, and chanting “Holy Shit” as if it were a soul-saving Hail Mary, usually even before the second commercial break.

So far, Fear’s spooky settings have included a condemned cement factory, an old mental hospital, and a former state penitentiary. According to the folks at MTV, each creepy base boasts longstanding urban legends, pages of reported paranormal activity, and a harrowing on-site death toll — claims bolstered by edited-in video clips of skittish psychics and colorful locals intoning stories of gruesome deaths, “cold spots,” and “strange presences.”

Believable or not, this ghoulish lore makes the contestants tremble. What shakes them even worse are Fear’s dares, which have them exploring sarcophaguses, channeling spirits, and orchestrating séances. Heavy-set Darrelle gathers ashes from an incinerator; Lauren the fashion student tries to pull a tarp off an electric chair; Ch’ien from Malaysia lies inside a closed cadaver drawer in a lobotomy room. Fear creaks like a Hitchcockian version of Double Dare, a black-and-white obstacle course where the slime on the slide could be embalming fluid and the pale-faced host is an irascible ghost.

So, does a troupe of college-age kids filming themselves as they slog after the supernatural sound like The Blair Witch Project? Yeah, MTV’s Fear is wholly derivative. But this is one instance where copycatting seems fitting: television’s self-congratulatory age of anti-acting was accelerated by Blair Witch’s box-office pounding. No surprise, then, that a network — especially the one that championed Blair Witch — would try to pour the madness of Heather, Josh, and Mike into snack-sized bites. And with several episodes in the bag, Fear is working — primarily because it delivers a similar batch of psychosis.

All of this might sound theme-parkish, like spelunking through Disney’s hologrammed Haunted Mansion. And Fear does cross that line when the undergraduate cast members call each other “baby doll,” or when tongue-studded Holly from Hollywood sheds a few tears and then whines, “I hope my waterproof mascara isn’t running!” Or when 18-year-old Amanda is asked to open a rusted box, retrieve one of the two tarantulas inside, and hold it for two minutes. Sure, spiders are creepy, but here they’re so obviously planted that they undermine the location’s palpable sense of isolation — which seems more campy than chilly.

Still, the spoonfuls of Fear have tasted more like strychnine than Count Chocula. Unlike The Real World, Fear doesn’t try to characterize, sexualize, or even disguise the messy psychic autopsies it seeks to perform — it just performs. Signs of the occult have recurred throughout, and whether or not these supernatural nuances are bunk, in every episode at least one quivering soul has freaked out. Some have quit on the spot and left the premises; others have nervously disqualified themselves.

So Fear is onto something. Maybe it’s the devil in the cobwebbed closet, the thing that goes bump in the night, or what made cocky Jim go “from skeptic to believer.” Maybe it’s nothing all. And that is kind of scary.

Issue Date: March 15 - 22, 2001