10 Horror Movies That Were Scarier For Making You Think They Were Real
4. Ghostwatch
On Halloween night 1992, the BBC broadcast the exceptionally well-crafted TV movie Ghostwatch, which presented itself as a legitimate news-style investigation of a supposedly haunted English house.
The film's success is largely a result of its production values, which feel entirely consistent with what audiences expected from actual BBC news broadcasts, to say nothing of the presence of talk show stalwart Michael Parkinson as Ghostwatch's host.
The film cuts between studio footage of Parkinson and a supposedly live broadcast from the house itself, where an assortment of increasingly bone-rattling scares take place.
Aided by the extremely strong performances of the central cast and faultless presentation, the BBC ended up receiving 30,000 phone calls from distressed viewers, causing a tabloid furore in the days that followed.
Ghostwatch was so effective that the Beeb refused to re-air or release it on home video for an entire decade. In the years since, its esteem has grown as one of the most ingenious blurrings of fact and fiction in TV history.