I’ve never been one for pranks. Sure, I’ve done my fair share of sneaking up on some poor, unsuspecting dope, jumping out of the shadows, and yelling “BOO!”, but anything more elaborate than that, and I’m just not interested.
I can’t watch TV shows and movies that seem to revel in humiliation. Shows like Punk’d and movies like Borat always leave me cold. What’s the use of fooling someone who (admittedly) probably deserves it in some capacity, like the awful people in Borat and Bruno? Are you teaching them a lesson? Are you changing their minds in any way? Probably not. Those people are there only to be laughed at by more “enlightened” people. Yawn.
I am intrigued, however, by the radio programs, TV shows and movies that do everything in their power short of sating outright, “This is fake!” and still viewers and listeners buy into them and believe that what they are seeing is absolutely real.
Hoaxes and pranks of this type have a long and rich pedigree. “The Unparalleled Adventures of One Hans Pfaall,” The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, and The Journal of Julius Rodman were all written by Edgar Allan Poe. They each had varying degrees of success in fooling the public. The Journal of Julius Rodman was believed to be true by at least one U.S. Senator.
Probably the most famous hoax of all-time is The Mercury Theater on the Air’s 1938 broadcast of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds. Though the terror Orson Welles et al. created in their audience may not have been as widespread or as profound as history has depicted (another layer of self-promotion by Welles?), the hallmarks of the proper media hoax are all there. The use of the tools of radio media at the time – the live orchestra playing, the breaking news, the man-on-the-street-reportage, the anarchy of live news, the dropped signal – lend a verisimilitude to the events that made it seem plausible if not absolutely real.
Just as Orson Welles used the tools at his disposal to pull the wool over his audience’s eyes, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez used the media and tropes available in 1999 to produce what I think is the scariest movie of all time: The Blair Witch Project. The film itself is choppy and raw, exactly what you would think found footage would look like. Myrick and Sánchez also produced official looking “Missing Person” posters with the three lead actors on them. A fake documentary on the SciFi Channel and a website on the Internet also helped to blur the line between fact and fiction.
Before The Blair Witch Project, there are two British in the TV hoax genre that deserve attention. The first is 1992’s Ghostwatch. Purporting to be a live broadcast of a haunting (on October 31, natch), Ghostwatch used well-known TV hosts, Michael Parkinson and Sarah Greene, to play themselves on-air. Footage jumped from Parkinson in the studio and Greene on-location in Northolt. The spirit of “Pipes” is seen from time to time and reported to the studio, but when the footage is rewound and reexamined, Pipes is nowhere to be found. The British TV viewing public took the events to be real, and the producers’ feet were held to the fire during a public inquest – on TV, of course.
The other British TV hoax that deserves a look-see during the Halloween season is Alternative 3. Broadcast only once in 1977, Alternative 3 shook those who watched it. Originally to be broadcast on 1 April, the date was changed to 20 June. More's the pity. Moments after the show ended, Anglia Television's telephones were beset by irate and terrified viewers. What they had just seen – an hour-long study of the “brain drain,” the collapse of the eco-system, and the three alternatives facing the human race – fed into the paranoia in the air of the late-1970s. At the end of the program, the viewer is presented with “evidence” that the population of Mars, the titular Alternative 3, has been underway for over a decade. Also caught on tape is proof that humanity is not alone.
So glad that we’ve gotten smarter and aren’t fooled by hucksters baring phony evidence…
…sigh.
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