Halloween: 10 Terrifying Things From The 90s

4. Ghost Watch

Tired of found footage films? Join the queue pal. If you've seen one demon lurking at the edge of a blurry CCTV monitor, you've seen them all. Or have you? I'm not trying to be scary. The Blair Witch Project is commonly cited as the definitive 90s found footage film, but that legend properly belongs to Ghost Watch, a BBC production from 1992 that confused and terrified viewers across the UK. The genius of Ghost Watch was in presenting its fiction in the format of a light entertainment extravaganza, replete with a gigantic and horribly over-lit studio set from which a coterie of real life TV personalities chattered blandly to real life members of the general public. There was no winking to camera, no 'this is just a bit of fun' sort of business. Even though it was advertised and credited as a drama, if you switched on halfway through you really had no choice but to assume that real life TV personality Sarah Greene really was stuck in a really small cupboard with a really real poltergeist, and that it really was clawing her real eyes out. For real. That poltergeist, by the way €“ dubbed Pipes by the (fictional) family, if you blink at any point during the 90 minute special you'll probably miss him. I don't want to give anything away, but he's in front of the curtains, no he's in the crowd, oh god bloody hell that's him in the lighting rig, sh*t! Ghost Watch worked €“ and still does €“ because it places no filter in front of the audience. In many ways, it's harder to pull that trick off in a movie. When we go into a cinema or (more likely) download a film, we know what we're watching is, unavoidably, a film, with all the layers of fiction that term implies. But when you're channel hopping and come upon the sight of real life TV personality Michael Parkinson speaking with the voice of an ancient psychic entity, you don't quite have that comforting frame of reference. Millions of irate viewers found this out the hard way.

Also, Pipes is behind you.