MTV is making an hour-long "found footage" show inspired by Paranormal Activity

MTV is apparently developing a new series called The Experiment that will be shot in the style of The Blair Witch Project and the Paranormal Activity franchise, incorporating the scary, creepy element of found footage. I'd turn my nose up at this idea if I didn't think it was so groovy -- if it was executed well.

For those of you keeping score, NBC will attempt to revive the '90s through sitcoms, MTV will do it with horror. Advantage: MTV. I never thought that would happen.

While there isn't a wealth of information out about this show yet -- besides it being produced by Paranormal Activity's Jason Blum and based on a story by Brian Horiuchi (Terminal D) and Miguel Sapochnik (House, Fringe) -- I think it's fair to have some hope for another potentially good horror-themed TV show. We have The Walking Dead on AMC, True Blood on HBO, and while TV is no stranger to the supernatural, more legitimately scary content is always welcome. And the found-footage premise can be extra, extra creepy, especially when done just right. (Admit it: even if you didn't like everything about the Paranormal Activity movies, at least some of those scenes gave you the creepin' heebie-jeebies.)

My main concern with a show like this would be keeping the premise fresh on a weekly basis, unless we're talking about a short, six-week series that won't wear out its welcome. Then again, we don't even know what the titular "experiment" is yet; The Hollywood Reporter is also calling it a "mystery" series, so it could be broader than just horror. Back in the '90s, The X-Files provided its viewers all kinds of stories that kept them awake at night, whether it was about the extra-terrestrial or the supernatural. And for most of its nine-season run, it was very effective. With a name like The Experiment, there might be another opportunity for such a unique show, taking on a different element of horror and ghosties and beasties every week. (Gahhhh, this could be awesome.)

It's a big leap of faith, but I will be pretty disappointed if this isn't good. Like if MTV goes with pretty young things as a cast and not a bunch of science-loving nerds, or goes the teen romance-Twilight route like it did with Teen Wolf (which was supposed to be about sunshine and basketball and van-surfing). Come on, MTV. You're the channel that brought us Beavis and Butthead. Don't let me down.

(Stop laughing.)

MTV developing 'Paranormal Activity'-style drama [The Hollywood Reporter]

• [soybeans]

  Anything to get out of playing actual music, I suppose.

• [Thomas Campbell]

  I can NOT believe this isn’t on SyFy…  lame kind of crap they love over there.

• [Kim McCleskey]

  MTV did a series years ago where people had to spend the night in a supposedly haunted location and complete certain tasks.  It was very Blair Witch Project-like, and I personally found it to be pretty creepy, at least in the first few episodes.  I remember there was one episode where they were in an old penitentiary, and they had to walk around in the dark with night-vision cameras on their heads, and had to sit in the old electric chair.  Their panic was pretty real at times.  A very creepy show.

  • [bcsizemo]

    I remember that as well.  It was a pretty decent series, and the one in the penitentiary was really good.  It wasn’t so much the actual footage that was emotionally charged as it was the reactions that the participants showed.  I sometimes wonder if I could muster up enough courage to not completely freakout sitting in an electric chair in the pitch black of night.

    • [GlyphGryph]

      Don’t remember the show, but that pretty much describes a high school past-time – getting a group of people together and running through exactly that, but being there with them in person. (except it was strapping them into one of those holding chairs, no electricity) Some AMAZING reactions.

      Now I realize I missed out – I should have filmed that stuff and launched my own web series!

• [Emo Pinata]

  So MTV is rebooting MTV’s Fear from the early 00s?

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MTV%27s_Fear 

  That show was decent. The opening episode of the second season was split into two because the first group all quit the show instead of spending one night at a haunted silver mine.

  • [bcsizemo]

    I might pay for real cable if MTV would reach way down in that bag of past shows and bring back Liquid Television.

• [Donald Petersen]

  That’s a pretty big leap of faith, indeed.  It’s awfully hard to get me interested in “found footage” horror, particularly of the Paranormal Activity static surveillance-cam flavor.  It worked just fine in that movie, but it doesn’t take long at all for the formula to wear thin: camera angle holds on a static angle, nothing particularly spooky there except maybe a slightly open door or a child’s crib, and an expectation that something is gonna suddenly jump out and go Booga-Booga any second now.  You milk that audience’s expectation for as long as you can, then make a loud noise on a shocking frame.  Then repeat on a different angle a couple of minutes later.  Then do another one.  Yawn…

  I can’t find a reference now, but I seem to remember John Carpenter talking about how easy it is to make an audience jump: you just thread a few feet of black film through the projector, then hit them with one white frame and a loud noise.  Actual, genuine fear and suspense (as opposed to startlement) requires quite a bit more creativity than just making an audience sit in the dark and wonder when the loud change in scenery is going to hit them.

  Any well-written script could overcome the latent weaknesses of the “found-footage” format (which mostly hinge upon either those boring static surveillance shots or an overabundance of unwatchably shaky handheld “amateur” videography), and one never knows when or where one will come across some really excellent horror scripting.

  But MTV would be the last place I’d expect to find it.

  • [Chentzilla]

    Wow, “startlement”. To meet a word that looks perfectly legit, yet somehow not right – that’s the stuff of nightmares. Almost as evil as 
    “I’d turn my nose up at this idea if I didn’t think it was so groovy — if it was executed well”, which makes you lose your sanity as you try to decipher if the writer likes the idea or not, or just likes to hear the sound of her voice, even when there’s actually no sound.

    • [Donald Petersen]

      I believe I first heard the word in O Brother Where Art Thou? and fell in love.  ”You shall see a cow on the roof of a cotton house, uh-huh, and oh, so many startlements…”

      Hell, if Bill Shakespeare could invent over 1700 words including such everyday ones as “blanket” and “submerge” and “dawn” and “unreal,” I figure the Coens can get away with one, too.

      As for “I’d turn my nose up at this idea if I didn’t think it was so groovy,” that caught my attention, too.  I expect I’d turn up my nose at a great many ideas that I don’t find groovy.  In fact, probably every idea I find un-groovy could expect to see the wrong side of my nostrils.

• [Boundegar]

  “With a name like The Experiment, there might be another opportunity for such a unique show, taking on a different element of horror and ghosties and beasties every week.”

  One of the weaknesses of the X-files was season one’s “monster of the week” feel.  They over came that with strong characters and writing, and in the later seasons developed an actual plot.  But we don’t really need another Scooby-Doo.

  • [Robert Drop]

    Oddly, I’ve always thought X-File’s mythology episodes were their weakest (certainly the story arcs were contradictory, incoherent and lacked any sort of pay-off), while their strongest episodes were monster-of-the-week.

    • [graou]

      When I was young and I discovered the first seasons I wanted so badly to see the development in the story… Then it took too long, and i prefered the monster-of-the-week ones.

      And since I’m already talking about myself, I can’t believe I just read :
      “good horror-themed TV show. We have The Walking Dead”
      Even with the dot in the middle I still don’t buy it.

      • [Donald Petersen]

        I do.  Though television as an art form has been undergoing quite a renaissance since the dog days of my youth in the 70s and 80s, really good horror programming is still incredibly rare.  Even though Showtime’s Masters of Horror had some really good episodes, that show had the advantages of no commercial breaks and no heavy-handed studio or network involvement when it came to Standards & Practices or story content.  There was one episode that Showtime declined to air (Takashi Miike’s Imprint) because it was too “disturbing,” but otherwise the filmmakers were given a modest budget and an hour to tell whatever horror story they wanted without outside interference.

        Considering The Walking Dead still has to contend with commercial breaks, the S&P folks at AMC seem to have a light hand indeed, as it’s about the most gruesome commercial TV show I’ve ever seen by far.  And I think it’s pretty good.  Inconsistent, as nearly every episodic series must be, but always watchable and frequently spooky and atmospheric, with characters you usually care about and monsters you genuinely wouldn’t want to meet in your own neighborhood.  It’s almost never unintentionally funny.

        I guess my point is that you have to kind of embrace what good stuff you can when it comes to horror.  Sure, The Walking Dead isn’t as great as, say, The Exorcist, but if you ask me it beats shows like True Blood into a cocked hat, and sometimes ranks with the better X-Files episodes.

        • [penguinchris]

          Everything Takashi Miike does is disturbing in one way or another, sometimes/often incredibly so, so I’m not sure what they were expecting there unless they weren’t actually familiar with his work. That sounds like an interesting show though, I’d never heard of it.

        • [Donald Petersen]

          Check it out, Chris.  Name-brand writers and directors of horror (Landis, Hooper, Coscarelli, Carpenter, Dante, Lansdale, Argento, Dickerson, etc.) doing hourlong horror movies, and given complete freedom to do so.  They’re out on DVD (including Imprint) and they’re a hoot.

          Showtime knew Miike’s ouevre, and were going to air his episode until they saw it.  They were all apologetic and everything, but just couldn’t do it.  (“No Limits,” they say.  Well, Miike found theirs.)  Show creator/showrunner Mick Garris says that Imprint was the most disturbing film he’d ever seen, so he couldn’t really blame Showtime all that much.

• [Snakefarmer]

  Hopefully, it’ll be better than Paranormal Activity. Within about five minutes, I was ready for both “protagonists” to be eviscerated by some sort of evil incubus shark-witch so I didn’t have to sit through any more.

• [cubby96]

  Jamie, related to this post – I would be interested to hear your opinion of the MTV series Awkward. 

  At my wife’s suggestion, I reluctantly returned to the network I had abandoned years before amidst endless vapid reality programming to watch this show, and found it surprisingly worthy of my time.  I especially like the way the Sadie character is written.