Fear Clinic Keeps Focus on Terror, Not Plot

Welcome to Embedda-Scare-A-Thon! For the week leading up to Halloween, NewTeeVee Station will be reviewing web series appropriate to the season. Stay tuned for five days’ worth of chills!

When I interviewed the stars of FearNET’s new web series Fear Clinic last summer, the one unresolved question was this: Can a web series you watch on your computer at home be as scary as watching a horror movie on the big screen? For Fear Clinic stars Robert Englund (Nightmare on Elm Street‘s Freddy Krueger) and Kane Hodder (Jason in several of the Friday the 13th films), the answer came down to context — but everyone’s mileage varies.

Featuring a cast drawn directly from the horror world, Fear Clinic is a conceptually unique exploration of phobias, centered around the unconventional methods of Dr. Andover (Englund), a doctor who seeks to cure the demons plaguing a group of attractive young people by forcing them to confront their worst fears. Once you sign up for Dr. Andover’s treatment, you’re pretty much his prisoner, which is fun for orderly Villatoro (Hodder), who enjoys tormenting the patients, but less fun for patient Susan (Danielle Harris), who is podcasting pleas for help via a purloined BlackBerry.

The five-episode series will run one episode a day for the week to come, and in the first three episodes provided for review, there’s an awful lot happening. Balls being juggled include Susan’s podcasting, the other young hotties seeking cures for their phobias, the twisted relationships between Andover and his employees, and the mysterious Fear Chamber, a device that triggers hallucinations of a person’s worst fears so that they might conquer them.

There’s an overstuffed sausage feel to the series as a result, only amplified by editing that chops up plot points. In the first episode, for example, hydrophobic Brett’s inheritance is said to depend on him conquering his fear of…water. Um, what? Is his inheritance hidden on a boat or something? We don’t find out, though — we’re too busy moving onto the next hallucination.

The series’ biggest flaw is that clear boundaries between the hallucination sequences and reality aren’t drawn from the beginning — which means that when the hallucinations start to infect the real world, the impact is dramatically diminished. And the Fear Chamber’s role in triggering these hallucinations is unclear, especially since it appears that only one trip in the device is enough to make you a walking mess.

This sense of clarity, though, has been sacrificed for the sake of those Fear Chamber-induced hallucinations, which are the show’s primary source of scares and are at times genuinely terrifying, depending on how you feel about decomposing crones, the monsters that might live in the dark, and spiders. Director Robert Hall, whose background in practical special effects is definitely in play here, has solid instincts for how to create these moments, and they’re definitely the highlight of the series. Though it’s also worth mentioning solid acting work by Englund and Kate Nauta, whose insect-related terror makes the third episode a standout.

And as for the fear induced by Fear Clinic? Looking at some of the other series we’ve slated for review this week, at least two of which are comedy-horror hybrids, it’s genuinely refreshing to see a show fully commit to its genre and seek to scare your pants off.

Scare-o-meter: 7 — some good creepy visuals, and my personal arachnophobia was definitely triggered by episode 3 (I had to look away at points). If the other series are as scary, I’m in for a rough week.

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