Not as a serious investigation of the paranormal, of course, but as a reminder of just how little man has evolved in some ways since the beginning of time.
It’s a reality game show, and it’s quite simple in concept: take six contestants. Hook them up with video equipment and a computer. Drop them in a place abandoned for years. Then, two nights in a row, have them go into the darkest, scariest corners the place has to offer while telling them stories of misery, death, and hauntings. They are alone, except for their fellow contestants and the video equipment they bring with them. Whoever stays until the end of Night 2 get $5000.
Now, bear with me. You have a bunch of twentysomethings, modern in every respect. They’ve been raised on science, the Internet, and cynicism; definitely not products of, say, Europe in the 16th century, when werewolves and witches lurked in every forest. You put them in an old, dark place that’ll inevitably creak and groan a lot. You leave them there alone, with stories that they KNOW may be made up running through their heads.
It always surprises me just how little it takes to cause the burliest, bravest, most cynical guy into a sobbing heap of terror. It really does. Fear of the dark, fear of the unknown… It’s still as powerful today as it was in the caveman days. Part of it is a remnant of a survival instinct that even now still has its uses.
Anyone ever seen this show? It’s really quite an interesting look at the human condition when faced with the unknown, and how far you can push that before it utterly snaps. I ask because the first episode of a new season just aired, and for the first time, all six contestants dropped out.
Whaddya think; is it possible for a place to, at the very least, have bad mojo, if not haunted?