‘Fear Itself’ lives up to the hype

By Casey Gillis

Published: June 5, 2008

Get ready to squirm.

Tonight marks the premiere of NBC’s new horror anthology series “Fear Itself” (10 p.m.).

The opening installment — there are 13 stand-alone episodes in all — is called “Sacrifice” and follows four shady guys who get more than they bargained for when their car breaks down in the middle of nowhere.

They seek refuge in what appears to be an abandoned fort nearby and meet three beautiful sisters who live there, shut off from the outside world.

You see where this is going, right? Alone in the wilderness, a broken-down car and no way to call for help — absolutely no good can come from this.

As a viewer, the guessing games quickly begin. Will the four guys be the ones terrorizing these seemingly innocent girls? Or are the girls the evil ones?

There’s clearly some malevolent force at work here.

At first, it’s of the “what you can’t see can scare the bejesus out of you” variety: growling in the shadows, something scurrying quickly by in the dark.

Our imaginations are always scarier than the reality. But once you see the actual monster here, it lives up to the hype.

Other installments of the anthology include next Thursday’s “Spooked,” which stars Eric Roberts as a private eye staking out a haunted house, and June 19’s “Family Man,” an intense thriller about a happy-go-lucky dad (Colin Ferguson, “Eureka”) who, after a near-death experience, somehow switches bodies with a serial killer (Clifton Collins Jr.).

If you’re looking for scary tales with happy endings, “Fear Itself” is not for you.

From what I’ve seen so far, it doesn’t look like there will be many of those.