Read an oral history of MTV's Fear

Mental Floss

The paranormal reality show that ran from 2000 to 2002 was a departure from MTV's traditional Real World fare. Fear, writes Jake Rossen, "remains an anomaly in the reality genre. Unlike most docudramas, there was no camera crew in sight. The cast wore chest-mounted cameras and carried handheld recorders to provoke a feeling of real isolation. Nor did the production orchestrate artificial scares—apparitions, fleeting figures in the woods—like a modern haunted house. Instead, the contestants were largely left alone to get lost in their own heads, the weight of the violent, sometimes-murderous locations bearing down on them as they sat in pitch-black areas thought to have paranormal occupations, sometimes for hours. Some contestants successfully made it through to the end; others quit in their hotel room, before they had even arrived at the site."