Editorials
“Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction” Offered a Unique Anthology With Viewer Participation [TV Terrors]
Horror and science fiction have always been a part of the television canvas, and constant attempts have been made over the years to produce classic entertainment. Some have fallen by the wayside, while others became mainstream phenomena. With “TV Terrors,” we take a look back at the many genre efforts from the 80’s, 90’s, and 00’s, exploring some shows that became cult classics, and others that sank in to obscurity.
This month we enter a world of truth and deception with “Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction.”
- Aired from 1997 – 2002
- Aired on FOX Network
“Tonight your challenge is to separate what is true from what is false. Five stories, some real, some fake. Can you judge which are fact and which are fiction? To find out, you must enter a world of both truth and deception, a world that is beyond belief.”
With the end of “Tales from the Crypt” in 1996 came the death of the anthology television show for a long while. FOX, however, took some stabs at re-inventing the formula with their introduction of the mystery anthology show “Beyond Belief” in 1997. Rather than offering fictional segments every week, this new series offered a gimmick that was so much fun and actually allowed audiences to participate.
Every week the host of the show, Jonathan Frakes (of “Star Trek: The Next Generation” fame), would introduce five filmed segments that featured stories and situations often too incredible to be true. Often times, the segments involved short stories about karma, revenge, murder, hauntings, fate, extraordinary coincidences, and miracles. Frakes would then ask the audience if the story we’d just seen was Fact (based on a true event, often), or Fiction (by some damn good writers). At the end of every episode, Frakes would run down the list of segments and let us know which of the segments we’d just seen were fabricated, and which were based on fact.
Often we were completely stunned, and left to our devices to discuss what we’d just learned. In a time before the internet became commonplace in our lives, it was especially maddening that we couldn’t go online and discuss the show with other fans and speculate. That was part of the fun, though, as it inspired us to play the skeptic, while also reveling in how weird and spectacular the world and reality could be. The results were frequently quite surprising, while other times the keen audience member could figure out which stories were completely bogus.
As you might guess, FOX aired the series in the middle of the summer on Friday nights when almost no one would be home to watch. I watched it every single week and anxiously awaited its return every year. FOX would air the series every summer, and then after a whole year bring it back again the next summer for only a few months with unannounced premieres and finales. Even still, the series garnered a cult following that kept the struggling show on the air in spite of FOX’s best efforts to bury it in ratings hell. And why wouldn’t it garner an audience? “Beyond Belief” was a mixture of clever and scary, with segments that really hit home, whether they were based on fact or not.
Sometimes the segments were pretty scary and other times the stories were just flat out heartbreaking. In one segment, a young girl is stuck in a cave under her house after a huge earthquake and is kept alive by the soothing voice of her dead grandfather, only for us to discover it was the family’s parrot mimicking him. Another segment involved a divorced couple re-uniting after years apart thanks to a mysterious DJ playing a song they both loved, only to find out neither of them made the song request. There’s the segment of a blind man’s dog that howls every time someone is about to die, and the tale of a family haunted by spooky glowing red eyes in their house. There’s also the segment of an abusive husband who is mysteriously strangled to death by, what witnesses insist to authorities, was an actual giant.
“Beyond Belief” had an addictive quality to it, especially if you loved mysteries and stories about fantastic tales from around the world. My favorite segment of the series involves a naive old woman whose troubled grandson is in constant trouble with local gangs. Due to the fact she lives in a crime infested neighborhood, he hires a mysterious locksmith to install a secure lock on the front door. He ensures her that it’ll keep only “bad people” out and is virtually impenetrable. Much to the old ladies’ surprise, her overly trusting heart is saved when the door lock won’t open for anyone that is intent on breaking in and or threatening her life. Lo and behold, it only opens for people she can trust. The ending offers a memorable twist that is great and kind of sad.
While original host James Brolin was fine, once Jonathan Frakes came aboard, the show really hit its stride. Frakes, with his theatrical presence and ability to build suspense, was a great addition to the series (the really creepy announcing from Don LaFontaine didn’t hurt, either). “Beyond Belief” was often a mix of Rod Serling’s “Night Gallery,” “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” and “Unsolved Mysteries,” where the host would introduce an element to the audience that was in some way connected to the stories in the episode. Frakes would often introduce an illusion for the audience, and discuss how the night’s stories would be about seeing more than meets the eye.
Thankfully “Beyond Belief” managed to air on FOX for four seasons from 1997 to 2002, before it was finally cancelled. It managed to flourish in syndication on cable television for years after on various channels like Syfy, and the now defunct Chiller, and has built a rather devoted fan base. “Beyond Belief” is a series that warrants a re-introduction, especially in a time where anthology horror has gained a huge resurgence. That’s a Fact.
Is It On DVD/Blu-ray? Personally, I wouldn’t mind a decent Blu-ray release somewhere down the road, as it’s still as addictive as ever, but on the bright side, the series is available in full on Amazon Prime Video, while most episodes can also be seen uncut on YouTube.
Due to a complex series of anthropological mishaps, the Wayans Brothers are a huge deal in Brazil. Around these parts, White Chicks is considered a national treasure by a lot of people, so it stands to reason that Brazilian audiences would continue to accompany the Wayans’ comedic output long after North America had stopped taking them seriously as comedic titans.
This is the only reason why I originally watched Michael Tiddes and Marlon Wayans’ 2013 horror spoof A Haunted House – appropriately known as “Paranormal Inactivity” in South America – despite having abandoned this kind of movie shortly after the excellent Scary Movie 3. However, to my complete and utter amazement, I found myself mostly enjoying this unhinged parody of Found Footage films almost as much as the iconic spoofs that spear-headed the genre during the 2000s. And with Paramount having recently announced a reboot of the Scary Movie franchise, I think this is the perfect time to revisit the divisive humor of A Haunted House and maybe figure out why this kind of film hasn’t been popular in a long time.
Before we had memes and internet personalities to make fun of movie tropes for free on the internet, parody movies had been entertaining audiences with meta-humor since the very dawn of cinema. And since the genre attracted large audiences without the need for a serious budget, it made sense for studios to encourage parodies of their own productions – which is precisely what happened with Miramax when they commissioned a parody of the Scream franchise, the original Scary Movie.
The unprecedented success of the spoof (especially overseas) led to a series of sequels, spin-offs and rip-offs that came along throughout the 2000s. While some of these were still quite funny (I have a soft spot for 2008’s Superhero Movie), they ended up flooding the market much like the Guitar Hero games that plagued video game stores during that same timeframe.
You could really confuse someone by editing this scene into Paranormal Activity.
Of course, that didn’t stop Tiddes and Marlon Wayans from wanting to make another spoof meant to lampoon a sub-genre that had been mostly overlooked by the Scary Movie series – namely the second wave of Found Footage films inspired by Paranormal Activity. Wayans actually had an easier time than usual funding the picture due to the project’s Found Footage presentation, with the format allowing for a lower budget without compromising box office appeal.
In the finished film, we’re presented with supposedly real footage recovered from the home of Malcom Johnson (Wayans). The recordings themselves depict a series of unexplainable events that begin to plague his home when Kisha Davis (Essence Atkins) decides to move in, with the couple slowly realizing that the difficulties of a shared life are no match for demonic shenanigans.
In practice, this means that viewers are subjected to a series of familiar scares subverted by wacky hijinks, with the flick featuring everything from a humorous recreation of the iconic fan-camera from Paranormal Activity 3 to bizarre dance numbers replacing Katy’s late-night trances from Oren Peli’s original movie.
Your enjoyment of these antics will obviously depend on how accepting you are of Wayans’ patented brand of crass comedy. From advanced potty humor to some exaggerated racial commentary – including a clever moment where Malcom actually attempts to move out of the titular haunted house because he’s not white enough to deal with the haunting – it’s not all that surprising that the flick wound up with a 10% rating on Rotten Tomatoes despite making a killing at the box office.
However, while this isn’t my preferred kind of humor, I think the inherent limitations of Found Footage ended up curtailing the usual excesses present in this kind of parody, with the filmmakers being forced to focus on character-based comedy and a smaller scale story. This is why I mostly appreciate the love-hate rapport between Kisha and Malcom even if it wouldn’t translate to a healthy relationship in real life.
Of course, the jokes themselves can also be pretty entertaining on their own, with cartoony gags like the ghost getting high with the protagonists (complete with smoke-filled invisible lungs) and a series of silly The Exorcist homages towards the end of the movie. The major issue here is that these legitimately funny and genre-specific jokes are often accompanied by repetitive attempts at low-brow humor that you could find in any other cheap comedy.
Not a good idea.
Not only are some of these painfully drawn out “jokes” incredibly unfunny, but they can also be remarkably offensive in some cases. There are some pretty insensitive allusions to sexual assault here, as well as a collection of secondary characters defined by negative racial stereotypes (even though I chuckled heartily when the Latina maid was revealed to have been faking her poor English the entire time).
Cinephiles often claim that increasingly sloppy writing led to audiences giving up on spoof movies, but the fact is that many of the more beloved examples of the genre contain some of the same issues as later films like A Haunted House – it’s just that we as an audience have (mostly) grown up and are now demanding more from our comedy. However, this isn’t the case everywhere, as – much like the Elves from Lord of the Rings – spoof movies never really died, they simply diminished.
A Haunted House made so much money that they immediately started working on a second one that released the following year (to even worse reviews), and the same team would later collaborate once again on yet another spoof, 50 Shades of Black. This kind of film clearly still exists and still makes a lot of money (especially here in Brazil), they just don’t have the same cultural impact that they used to in a pre-social-media-humor world.
At the end of the day, A Haunted House is no comedic masterpiece, failing to live up to the laugh-out-loud thrills of films like Scary Movie 3, but it’s also not the trainwreck that most critics made it out to be back in 2013. Comedy is extremely subjective, and while the raunchy humor behind this flick definitely isn’t for everyone, I still think that this satirical romp is mostly harmless fun that might entertain Found Footage fans that don’t take themselves too seriously.
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