Fear Itself
Tags: suspenseful

Plot synopsis:
While carving jack-o'-lanterns in Xander's basement, the gang discusses plans for Halloween; Buffy continues to mope over her situation with Parker. They decide to go to the Alpha-Delta house for a party. The next day at school, Buffy and Oz both express their concerns for Willow and her use of magic. Buffy spots Parker and immediately runs away. Willow follows her, explaining that she should get over it and have fun at the party that night, but Buffy thinks that Giles will want her to patrol. When Buffy goes to visit Giles, she's surprised to find him embracing the Halloween spirit. He discourages her from patrolling and encourages her to go party.
At the Alpha-Delta house, the members are getting ready for the party. One finds a symbol in an old book to paint on the floor. Anya goes to see Xander, wanting to know where their relationship is heading. He agrees that they're somewhat dating, inviting her to the party. Buffy, who skipped her psych class, visits the professor and asks for her assignment, but she receives a cold response. Riley, however, gives her the assignment, telling her to have fun on Halloween. Oz and Xander carry a sound system to the Alpha-Delta house, and Oz installs it while one guy paints the symbol from the book. Oz cuts his hand, spilling drops of his blood, which activates the ritual to summon Gachnar.
Joyce alters one of Buffy's old costumes, Little Red Riding Hood, and talks with her about how things used to be. Buffy waits outside the house for her friends, and Xander shows up dressed as James Bond. They run into Willow, dressed as Joan of Arc, and Oz, going as God. Everything at the party starts to go awry as fears begin to become real, and the fake scary objects like plastic spiders and skeletons, become alive. The gang enters the house, but they encounter several obstacles. Later, Anya arrives at the party, dressed as a bunny, but she is unable to get inside because the entrances to the house have become sealed up. She sees a girl screaming at a window, and the window then disappears from the house. Inside, Buffy tells the gang to find a way out and get help. A skeleton attacks her from behind, but after she attacks, it becomes fake again. Buffy and Willow fight over Buffy rejecting help from her friends and pushing them away, as well as Buffy and Oz arguing with Willow about her use of witchcraft. Willow insists she can safely do a guidance spell. Meanwhile, Anya goes to Giles for help.
Xander tries to talk to the gang but finds that he's become invisible to them. Willow and Oz find a staircase and head up. As they're walking, Oz begins to change into a werewolf and scratches Willow before running away from her. Xander approaches a mirror, and a head on the table behind him says that he can see him. Oz sits in a bathtub, chanting to himself that he isn't going to change. Willow conjures her spell. However, it quickly spins out of control, and she screams for help as it attacks her. Buffy, hearing Willow's cries, tries to get to her, but she falls into the basement where bodies come up from the ground and grab at her. Giles and Anya are unable to find a way inside, so Giles cuts a door using a chainsaw. While fleeing through the house, the gang ends up in the room where the mystical symbol is painted. Giles and Anya break into the room. They determine the sign on the floor to be the Mark of Gachnar, and Buffy and Giles express fear about how scary the demon looks in the illustration. Buffy destroys the symbol before Giles can tell her that destroying the symbol will bring Gachnar forth. But when the demon has manifested, it turns out to be merely a few inches in height. After a laugh at absurdity of giving in to one's fears, Buffy squashes Gachnar with her shoe. At Giles' place, the gang eats candy while Giles makes a discovery: the arcane footnote below the illustration of Gachnar in his book reads "Actual Size" .

Review: This show is not excellent but it isn't bad either, each week the show seems to be improving, not to mention a more well known variation of cast members.It is entirely up to the viewer their own points of view but in mine its worth giving it a watch, especially the new years day or eater episodes.Unfortunately those who expect this to compare or even match up to supernatural are sadly mistaken, this show is in an element of its own and should not be compared to anything else.
i think this is why the majority of people are quick to disregard this show, as they compare it to much more successful longer running shows.who knows maybe this will turn into a long running show.all we need to do is give it a chance..
As a whole this series is better than the second season of Master's of Horror by a long shot.
Spooked and Community are the two bright spots in the series thus far, in sickness and health and new years day where not very good.
I think my favorite episodes at this point are In sickness and in health and Skin and bones.
Come on fellows give it a chance, the series is only five episodes in and reviewers are already calling it the worst horror anthology to grace the TV!
Personally, i was always worried about Masters of Horror moving to NBC, MOH was hit and miss, the first season; quite excellent in my book, the second besides Gordon's and Rob Schmidt's episodes was mediocre, the only thing making it watchable at most times was blood and tits, 'Fear Itself' has none of those simple fall backs going for it and i have to say its been holding up better than the latter season.
Suspenseful and gripping in sixty minutes, instead of seeing the lead characters in "Supernatural" this show features some familiar and new faces and their performances are above average but their dynamics are what make the show great with a good pinch of subtlety; never knowing what's gonna happen next.
Even more impressive is despite having great production values, some of the best writers of horror fiction lend their pen to ensure good stories and keep the audience on the edge of their seat.
Although its obvious its a "season replacement" for the summer, it satisfies it's core audience really well in every regard and if time persists, may knock "Supernatural" as top-dog of TV horror series.Check it out!!.
A blood and gore horror series that has little twist and it's endings are to predictable..
"NBC's" new horror series "Fear Itself" so far has had plenty of blood and gore as the series always has spooky stories that centers around themes of vampires, crazy ghost, and gruesome serial killers.
Also so far only about two episodes have had a good twist that was the one in which Eric Roberts stared as a P.I., and the "Family Man" episode the rest are so predictable.
Still at times the suspense does remind one of "The Twilight Zone", with it's spooky feel similar to "The Hitchhiker" series and the gore and blood equals "Tales from the Crypt" in some ways.
Still the series falls almost flat because of the predictable and campy stories because so many of them don't have any plot twist and no humor is involved.
So really even if you like horror TV series you can be alright to pass on these feel-bad fables..
I love all things spooky and have watched many a not-so-great show just because it has a horror element.
When I watched the pilot episode of this series I thought it had potential.
But the production value of the following episodes never matched the pilot, the writing got more and more clichéd and predictable, the directing is not so great (pacing and timing, anyone?), and the acting...
Last night's episode was so freaking painful to watch (I have seen better performances at grade school talent shows) I turned it off after 5 minutes.Don't waste your time..
The ever-lowering bar of horror anthology TV hits rock bottom with Fear Itself..
Horror anthology on TV has been getting progressively worse since it hit it's pinnacle with Tales From the Crypt (TFTC).
TFTC was an amazingly brilliant masterpiece of horror TV anthology series that set the bar for this type of programming as high as it could possibly be.
TFTC still provided 6 Seasons worth of perfect TV horror.Then came Masters of Horror (MoH), and next notable TV horror anthology series.
Despite being a bad series overall, at least that's 8 brilliant episodes of horror television that MoH contributed to the annals of great TV horror.Then comes Fear Itself.
In terms of format and flexibility about what content they cannot show, Fear Itself is exactly on par with the old kids' TV shows "Goosebumps" or "Bonechillers" or "Are You Afraid of the Dark?".However, although they are exactly on par with each other in terms of tone and what they cannot show, the *quality* of the content of Fear Itself is laughably worse than all of those kids' shows, to an extreme degree.Fear Itself is horror anthology TV hitting rock bottom.The 'theme song' to Fear Itself sounds like it's sung by a laboratory baboon who has just been injected by mad scientists with all kinds of wacky drugs.
A shame that such good visuals during the opening credits are utterly ruined with that babyish assault upon the senses of a 'song'.You may often have heard that Fear Itself is an hour long - that's wrong, don't believe it.
It's a problem with bad scripts and bad writing far more-so than running-time.
The 42 minute running-time of Fear Itself is admittedly a less-than-ideal handicap for good storytelling.
But Fear Itself doesn't do much of anything with the characters or plot even with the time they *do* have.
In Fear Itself, the amount of content in the episode does not fit with the running-time of the episode.
For example, look at the 'In Sickness and in Health' episode; 17 minutes wasted on repeating the same content over and over again (a bride panicking about a note in the Church and having inane conversations with her friends).
All of that content which could *easily* have fit into 5 minutes or less.The acting in Fear Itself is terrible across the board.
Sometimes, like in the episode 'Family Man', the D-List actors can surprise you and be excellent at acting.
*Usually* though, they will be every bit as terrible as you expected them to be.Almost every episode has dozens of plot-holes.
To add insult to injury, the 'stories' are just rehashes of stale-old clichés that have been done a million times before.Any viewer of Fear Itself could *undoubtedly* write *much* better dialogue, characters, and plot lines than are in Fear Itself; even someone with no talent for writing whatsoever.A feature-length running-time is not required to tell a good story, as some have argued to try to make excuses for Fear Itself.
For example, the MoH episode 'Incident on and Off a Mountain Road.' 55 minutes minus a few for opening and closing credits, and it had brilliant character & plot development and is a masterpiece in own right.
Likewise with the MoH episode 'The Black Cat' which is ~57 minutes minus opening credits.TFTC was a half-hour show, but those characters and plots were amazingly immersing and fleshed-out *despite that* in almost every single episode.
In fact, some people remember TFTC as being 1 hour episodes because the episodes *feel* like they are due to being so richly-made with great characters and plots.
The problem with accepting Fear Itself , despite it being garbage, is that it sets the bar for horror TV as low as it can possibly be.
If that precedent is accepted, then future horror TV shows will be just as bad.
Therefore, it is better to be honest about Fear Itself in order to let the makers of horror know that a good horror product is expected in the future, not more crap..
From watching these episodes I can tell that the problem lies with the writers, I mean we're talking talking about the writers of The Fly 2, Road House 2, usually not a single good horror film to their name, so what makes them think they can pull off a horror series when the last things they did were crap.The acting is good though, the music's good, sets, props all good.
In fact, the title sequence is usually the only good thing about this series.
The two episodes I have seen so far had no plot progression at all, and in one case I predicted the 'twist' a mere 10 minutes into the show.
Fear Itself: Above Average Satisfying Horror Series.
Almost every disk comes with four episodes, containing a little bit of different genres, with metaphysical/mystical themes or murders with a twist.The theme song of the series is very charming and evocative, reminiscent of the Creature Feature kind of style for those readers familiar with it.
The arrangement of the episodes, two on each side, is a little peculiar by modern standards and the menu navigation is a little cumbersome, but the plots themselves are often worth the trouble and managed to surprise me with their twist unlike most detective stories which I can solve within minutes of reading or watching.
In contrast, the occasional subtlety of Fear Itself allows the answers to remain hidden for a while longer.In my opinion, such unpredictable twists of the murder mysteries along with the variety of the truly supernatural kinds of horror make for a delightful pastime.Although structurally the episodes are not connected, each following an entirely independent cast of characters and plot lines, I can appreciate why some episodes were placed together based on their thematic similarity or, conversely, opposition.Overall, I really like this series but I don't think I could like it as much if I expected another Twilight Zone(which it is certainly not, lacking a host) or R.L Stine's Haunting Hour(because each episode of Fear Itself is longer).
I hope after reading my review you guys would at least consider the very first disk, because it had, what I consider to be, the most brilliant episode of the entire series and if you don't like even it, you would know with relative surety that Fear Itself is not for you(I don't even have to spoil your fun by naming it or numbering it because when you see it, you'll know exactly which one I meant!)..
This is an anthology horror series from NBC filmed in Canada.
It's an anthology, which, depending, can be good or bad.I like most of the actors, the directing was good.I have yet watched all episodes, sort of 'hoarding' them.There were definite twists and turns, which is always good.
(You know, when you 'think' he/she 'did it', but, it turns out you're wrong.) To me, that's good writing, acting & directing..
Surely lighting a little bit that was on top of the cover will cause the contents of the well to be entirely engulfed in flame as depicted, even though very little gasoline save for maybe a medicine cup's even entered it, over a period of a few minutes.Spooked: Great episode until the end.
Aside from the ending though, this is great, one of the better episodes.Family Man: -Excellent-.
Without a doubt, this was the best episode of the series, and one of the best horror anthology episodes I've seen in a long, long time.In Sickness and in Health: You know that thing it sitcoms where someone acts really angry, but then suddenly they're complimenting you?
Pretty bad, doesn't feel like Landis did this at all.Easter: Great work.
It managed to make me jump a few times, and the ending was highly creative.New Years Day: Great until the fridge logic pops in and you realize that the plot twist creates a lot of plot holes.
Doug Jones makes this episode worth watching, but the rest is not really that good.
If you're a fan of the Wendigo legend or a Doug Jones fan, watch this.Something With Bite: -Hilarious.- This feels more like a John Landis episode than the John Landis episode did.
The plot twist isn't predictable, at least.Chance: Confusing, feels really unfinished.
I'm thinking maybe this episode -was- unfinished, maybe one of the last episodes made.The Spirit Box: Plot twist was -extremely- predictable.
The actors seem to just be having fun with it, like they -know- what they're doing is bad.
y'know, I'll just leave it at this: This feels like it could be expanded into a bad film that the Mystery Science Theater 3000/Rifftrax guys would love to riff.Overall, I'd say just watch Spooked, Family Man, Something With Bite, and Eater.
If you love to mock stuff, watch The Circle, Community, and Sacrifice.Also, don't base your decision on who directed what episode.
The better directors actually did some of the worst episodes, to the point where they don't feel like they were actually made by those directors..
I came across Fear Itself (and its prior 'Masters of...' series) a week ago whilst looking through the Sci-Fi listings on TV.com.
Lured by the idea of a new premise each episode, I downloaded all the aired episodes to date of this review.With everything entirely different each episode, the series seems cold and lost, which some will like, some won't.
Some episodes aren't too strong, for this, I would recommend the series to young or easily-scared viewers rather than more mature viewers who won't be as impressed.I've put some plot keywords down as tips (settings, characters, story) to each episode, nothing too spoiling, and nothing the current synopsises won't provide you with.
If you don't want to know *anything* about the episode, then avoid gazing at them, since the reviews don't spoil anything at all, and will be useful pointers as to which episodes to not waste 40 minutes of your life on.1.
The Sacrifice: 7/10 (Plot keywords; Vampire, survival, trapped, fort) The first episode was filmed in the same secluded fort used for the film Ginger Snaps Back, so more than top marks for the setting/scenery.
I can't say much about the episode basis without spoiling it, but the plot was 'good'.
However some the dialogue and voice acting could have been better, as well as some corners polished, but this is something to expect from the series.2.
Spooked: 4/10 (Plot keywords; Haunted house, set up, traumatic childhood flashbacks) This episode's premise was rather weak, combined with the fact I can't stand Eric Roberts for some reason, I didn't really enjoy it.
Family Man: 8.5/10 (Plot keywords; Spiritual transmigration, serial killer, family man, prison) Brilliant premise, this episode really stands out from the rest - extremely dark (if not too dark), well-written and well-executed - definitely a 'must-see'.4.
In Sickness and in Health: 2/10 (Plot keywords; Wedding, church, serial killer, chase, so-so) From the synopsis I could tell this episode wouldn't pull it off, but it really, really stank.
Seriously, I didn't know they could write plot holes this big.
I cannot believe how bad this episode was, two points for the slightly-eery church at night setting.5.
Eater: 2/10 (Plot keywords; Voodoo cannibal, prison) Again, pretty poor episode with no twist to it...
And like the last episode, the ending made it go from bad to worse...
New Year's Day: 8/10 (Plot keywords; Zombies, city chaos, survival) I quite liked this episode.
Both the twist and ending for this episode were great.
I'd say the sets were definitely 'well-used' over the time-line, there could have been less flashbacks, but great episode anyway.7.
Community: 6/10 (Plot keywords; Housing estate conspiracy, contract, brainwashing) Despite there not being much twist to this episode, I quited liked it's consistent conspiracy feel, and the ending was quite sad.If possible, I will update this review as further episodes air..
I missed the first episode and I thought to myself, maybe this will be horrible.Then 'Spooked' came on and it wasn't as bad as expected but Eric Roberts acted good and the shocker was that there was no one living in that house at all and the girl was the ghost's sister and he accidentally gets shot by his buddy in the end and the sister gives a little grin.
I found out what was happening when he walked into the empty house.Along comes 'The Family Man' which has to be the greatest episode I've ever seen, even better than 'Masters of Horror,' with an ending so magnificent, I was in shock.'IN Sickness and IN Health,' well, I don't want to talk about it.and Eater with a great ending, good ending and creepy characters, also a great story and sets, that one gets my vote.Overall I love Fear Itself and if it plays more episodes along the lines of 'The Family Man' and 'Eater' it might be the king..
I am amazed with all the negative feedback here, this show so far is superb, put it this way it is the twilight zone; tales from the crypt and the outer limits in one show, it is far more entertaining than the flood of B grade horror movies that came recently, the show episodes deals with different horror themes like Canibalism and witchcraft in (Eater), Zombies in (New Years Eve), Vampires in (Sacrifice), Ghosts in (Spooked), Body switch in (Family man) and the list go on.
The actors, the scenario, the direction and the cinematography are all excellent, in short words this series is for the die hard horror fan and I really wish that the producers of this show just keep making more seasons of this amazing series..
This episode was great.
Youfind you that the wife, who has been scared the whole time, spoke to her new husband and asked him if he wanted to know what the note said.
Fear Itself is a good addition to the summer drama shows.