It was announced yesterday that the team behind Masters of Horror would be taking the concept to network television under the title Fear Itself. The wording in most of the news releases that I’ve seen have been ambiguous enough that many people firmly believe that this is a sanitized spin-off of Masters of Horror and not a replacement. Considering that each of the previous seasons of Masters of Horror have begun the week before Halloween, and the third season hasn’t been announced yet, I wouldn’t get my hopes up.

The main complaint this announcement has drawn is that the relatively relaxed guidelines of Masters of Horror will be lost on a network program. From a purely cynical standpoint, I think it’s genius. The version that actually airs on television will reach a much larger potential audience than the cable version and will sell to a completely different market when the unrated, uncensored DVDs are released. It will probably be the biggest divide between the original screening and the home release possible.

Mercenary reasons notwithstanding, I’m at least partially interested in this venture because there seems to have been very few anthology horror programs on network television in the past few years. That may seem very specific, but at least part of the reason I even got into horror was because there were programs on television that my parents had no problem letting me watch that came just up to the line without crossing it, yet still managed to pack a punch, if only to my underdeveloped mind. Shows like The New Twilight Zone, Amazing Stories, and Monsters, not to mention reruns of the original Twilight Zone and Night Gallery, none of which required tuning in each week to avoid losing track of the continuity. It’s one of the reasons I can respect a show like Supernatural even if it has a hard time retaining my interest. These shows aren’t necessarily meant for me. It’s the initiation for the next generation of horror fanatics.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 26th, 2007 at 12:37 am and is filed under Television. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.