PLOT: Robert Englund hosts a horror anthology that finds its stories in newspaper articles from the 1800s and early 1900s.
REVIEW: There are only six episodes in the first season of the Travel Channel's new anthology series True Terror with Robert Englund, but there are eighteen separate horror stories packed into those episodes, as each episode features three stories of varying lengths. The fact that this show is airing on the Travel Channel probably gives you a good idea what sort of content to expect from these stories – they don't go too far, but some of them might give the creeps.
What's really interesting about True Terror is the fact that is serves as something of a history lesson. Every story told in this series claims to be lifted directly from newspaper articles published throughout the 19th century and into the early decades of the 20th century; they take place between 1848 and 1930. I didn't look up every one of them to verify that they were indeed discussed in old newspapers, but I did look up a few and found that the show wasn't lying about them, they had been written about in the past. The writers might have added some details here and there, but they were working from historical reports, and there were only one or two of these events that I had heard about before.
I certainly don't believe everything in this show actually happened, I'm a skeptic about most of these things, but I do believe that the people involved with the incidents thought this is what was going on.
Subjects covered in these episodes include nightmarish premonitions, vengeful ghosts, cryptids, animal attacks, witchcraft, bloodsuckers, a serial killer called the Axe Man, and even a dragon. It's clear that True Terror did not have a large budget to work with, so the special effects aren't likely to blow anybody away, but I'm forgiving about these things. The CGI dragon is dodgy, sure, but it gets the point across well enough and it's interesting to find out that some cowboys thought they saw a dragon flying around Arizona a couple hundred years ago.
The setting of these stories was very appealing to me, as I'm always advocating for the horror and western genres to get mashed together more often, and since the majority of the stories take place in the 1800s this was horror-western bliss.
Robert Englund does a fine job as the host of this show, presenting all of the stories as he stands in a street outside an old building in the middle of the night. Englund is not in Freddy mode, he's not a cackling Cryptkeeper type, he's basically just himself, here to share some stories with the viewer in a matter-of-fact sort of way. This is about giving you an unsettling history lesson, remember, not about tormenting you. Of course, I'm sure it's no coincidence that a story in the first episode gives Englund the chance to say things like "Could his nightmare be real?" and "If dreams can come true, so can nightmares."
As Englund provides narration in a "let me tell you a campfire story" tone, the stories are also helped along by interviews with various "talking heads"; historians, paranormal experts and investigators, even a couple horror filmmakers.
If you're into horror and American history, and if the low budget television look isn't too much of a hurdle for you to get over, this show is a pleasant way to spend six hours.
True Terror with Robert Englund begins airing on the Travel Channel on Wednesday, March 18th at 10pm, and will continue airing every Wednesday at 10pm through April 22nd.