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.
Here’s what we know about Longlegs so far. It’s coming in July of 2024, it’s directed by Osgood Perkins (The Blackcoat’s Daughter), and it features Maika Monroe (It Follows) as an FBI agent who discovers a personal connection between her and a serial killer who has ties to the occult. We know that the serial killer is going to be played by none other than Nicolas Cage and that the marketing has been nothing short of cryptic excellence up to this point.
At the very least, we can assume NEON’s upcoming film is going to be a dark, horror-fueled hunt for a serial killer. With that in mind, let’s take a look at five disturbing serial killers-versus-law-enforcement stories to get us even more jacked up for Longlegs.
MEMORIES OF MURDER (2003)
This South Korean film directed by Oscar-winning director Bong Joon-ho (Parasite) is a wild ride. The film features a handful of cops who seem like total goofs investigating a serial killer who brutally murders women who are out and wearing red on rainy evenings. The cops are tired, unorganized, and border on stoner comedy levels of idiocy. The movie at first seems to have a strange level of forgiveness for these characters as they try to pin the murders on a mentally handicapped person at one point, beating him and trying to coerce him into a confession for crimes he didn’t commit. A serious cop from the big city comes down to help with the case and is able to instill order.
But still, the killer evades and provokes not only the police but an entire country as everyone becomes more unstable and paranoid with each grizzly murder and sex crime.
I’ve never seen a film with a stranger tone than Memories of Murder. A movie that deals with such serious issues but has such fallible, seemingly nonserious people at its core. As the film rolls on and more women are murdered, you realize that a lot of these faults come from men who are hopeless and desperate to catch a killer in a country that – much like in another great serial killer story, Citizen X – is doing more harm to their plight than good.
Major spoiler warning: What makes Memories of Murder somehow more haunting is that it’s loosely based on a true story. It is a story where the real-life killer hadn’t been caught at the time of the film’s release. It ends with our main character Detective Park (Song Kang-ho), now a salesman, looking hopelessly at the audience (or judgingly) as the credits roll. Over sixteen years later the killer, Lee Choon Jae, was found using DNA evidence. He was already serving a life sentence for another murder. Choon Jae even admitted to watching the film during his court case saying, “I just watched it as a movie, I had no feeling or emotion towards the movie.”
In the end, Memories of Murder is a must-see for fans of the subgenre. The film juggles an almost slapstick tone with that of a dark murder mystery and yet, in the end, works like a charm.
CURE (1997)
If you watched 2023’s Hypnotic and thought to yourself, “A killer who hypnotizes his victims to get them to do his bidding is a pretty cool idea. I only wish it were a better movie!” Boy, do I have great news for you.
In Cure (spoilers ahead), a detective (Koji Yakusho) and forensic psychologist (Tsuyoshi Ujiki) team up to find a serial killer who’s brutally marking their victims by cutting a large “X” into their throats and chests. Not just a little “X” mind you but a big, gross, flappy one.
At each crime scene, the murderer is there and is coherent and willing to cooperate. They can remember committing the crimes but can’t remember why. Each of these murders is creepy on a cellular level because we watch the killers act out these crimes with zero emotion. They feel different than your average movie murder. Colder….meaner.
What’s going on here is that a man named Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara) is walking around and somehow manipulating people’s minds using the flame of a lighter and a strange conversational cadence to hypnotize them and convince them to murder. The detectives eventually catch him but are unable to understand the scope of what’s happening before it’s too late.
If you thought dealing with a psychopathic murderer was hard, imagine dealing with one who could convince you to go home and murder your wife. Not only is Cure amazingly filmed and edited but it has more horror elements than your average serial killer film.
MANHUNTER (1986)
In the first-ever Hannibal Lecter story brought in front of the cameras, Detective Will Graham (William Petersen) finds his serial killers by stepping into their headspace. This is how he caught Hannibal Lecter (played here by Brian Cox), but not without paying a price. Graham became so obsessed with his cases that he ended up having a mental breakdown.
In Manhunter, Graham not only has to deal with Lecter playing psychological games with him from behind bars but a new serial killer in Francis Dolarhyde (in a legendary performance by Tom Noonan). One who likes to wear pantyhose on his head and murder entire families so that he can feel “seen” and “accepted” in their dead eyes. At one point Lecter even finds a way to gift Graham’s home address to the new killer via personal ads in a newspaper.
Michael Mann (Heat, Thief) directed a film that was far too stylish for its time but that fans and critics both would have loved today in the same way we appreciate movies like Nightcrawler or Drive. From the soundtrack to the visuals to the in-depth psychoanalysis of an insanely disturbed protagonist and the man trying to catch him. We watch Graham completely lose his shit and unravel as he takes us through the psyche of our killer. Which is as fascinating as it is fucked.
Manhunter is a classic case of a serial killer-versus-detective story where each side of the coin is tarnished in their own way when it’s all said and done. As Detective Park put it in Memories of Murder, “What kind of detective sleeps at night?”
INSOMNIA (2002)
Maybe it’s because of the foggy atmosphere. Maybe it’s because it’s the only film in Christopher Nolan’s filmography he didn’t write as well as direct. But for some reason, Insomnia always feels forgotten about whenever we give Nolan his flowers for whatever his latest cinematic achievement is.
Whatever the case, I know it’s no fault of the quality of the film, because Insomnia is a certified serial killer classic that adds several unique layers to the detective/killer dynamic. One way to create an extreme sense of unease with a movie villain is to cast someone you’d never expect in the role, which is exactly what Nolan did by casting the hilarious and sweet Robin Williams as a manipulative child murderer. He capped that off by casting Al Pacino as the embattled detective hunting him down.
This dynamic was fascinating as Williams was creepy and clever in the role. He was subdued in a way that was never boring but believable. On the other side of it, Al Pacino felt as if he’d walked straight off the set of 1995’s Heat and onto this one. A broken and imperfect man trying to stop a far worse one.
Aside from the stellar acting, Insomnia stands out because of its unique setting and plot. Both working against the detective. The investigation is taking place in a part of Alaska where the sun never goes down. This creates a beautiful, nightmare atmosphere where by the end of it, Pacino’s character is like a Freddy Krueger victim in the leadup to their eventual, exhausted death as he runs around town trying to catch a serial killer while dealing with the debilitating effects of insomnia. Meanwhile, he’s under an internal affairs investigation for planting evidence to catch another child killer and accidentally shoots his partner who he just found out is about to testify against him. The kicker here is that the killer knows what happened that fateful day and is using it to blackmail Pacino’s character into letting him get away with his own crimes.
If this is the kind of “what would you do?” intrigue we get with the story from Longlegs? We’ll be in for a treat. Hoo-ah.
FALLEN (1998)
Fallen may not be nearly as obscure as Memories of Murder or Cure. Hell, it boasts an all-star cast of Denzel Washington, John Goodman, Donald Sutherland, James Gandolfini, and Elias Koteas. But when you bring it up around anyone who has seen it, their ears perk up, and the word “underrated” usually follows. And when it comes to the occult tie-ins that Longlegs will allegedly have? Fallen may be the most appropriate film on this entire list.
In the movie, Detective Hobbs (Washington) catches vicious serial killer Edgar Reese (Koteas) who seems to place some sort of curse on him during Hobbs’ victory lap. After Reese is put to death via electric chair, dead bodies start popping up all over town with his M.O., eventually pointing towards Hobbs as the culprit. After all, Reese is dead. As Hobbs investigates he realizes that a fallen angel named Azazel is possessing human body after human body and using them to commit occult murders. It has its eyes fixated on him, his co-workers, and family members; wrecking their lives or flat-out murdering them one by one until the whole world is damned.
Mixing a demonic entity into a detective/serial killer story is fascinating because it puts our detective in the unsettling position of being the one who is hunted. How the hell do you stop a demon who can inhabit anyone they want with a mere touch?!
Fallen is a great mix of detective story and supernatural horror tale. Not only are we treated to Denzel Washington as the lead in a grim noir (complete with narration) as he uncovers this occult storyline, but we’re left with a pretty great “what would you do?” situation in a movie that isn’t afraid to take the story to some dark places. Especially when it comes to the way the film ends. It’s a great horror thriller in the same vein as Frailty but with a little more detective work mixed in.
Look for Longlegs in theaters on July 12, 2024.
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