Most gameshows these days are deathly dull. More often than not they revolve around unnecessarily gussied up penny arcade novelties augmented with irresponsibly shiny floors and/or Danny Dyer.
You could never say that about ITV2’s Release the Hounds. A terrifying gameshow that culminated with its panic-stricken contestants literally fleeing from a pack of snarling canines, Release the Hounds always looked and felt like it was made by true horror obsessives. The series knew its references, and it executed them perfectly, while being staged, shot and edited exactly like a horror movie. There was a celebrity edition, for instance, that revolved around the violent – and convincing – abduction of Joey Essex. It was silly, it was self-aware, and at times it could be truly frightening.
Release the Hounds is dead. But in its place looms its mutant offspring. ITV2’s new horror gameshow Killer Camp – airing from Sunday every day until Halloween – doesn’t quite scale the giddy heights of its predecessor, but is still much better than it has any right to be.
Killer Camp narrows its horror focus to 80s slashers, primarily Friday the 13th and its Crystal Lake Camp. The contestants are young and attractive and merrily gormless, and have essentially been tricked into appearing on the show, after applying to take part in a nonexistent Love Island–ish series called Summer Camp.
Their illusions are cut short when, during a fun little pedalo ride in the opening moments, one of the contestants suddenly burns to death. From there, they learn they have a murderer in their midst. One of them is a mole, and they are all in danger. Over five nights the contestants have to work to uncover the truth. If they don’t, they’ll end up dead.
It’s an intriguing premise, and one which – for the most part – manages to work. The contestants all twitch and squirm, endlessly second-guessing each other as they go through the rote reality TV machinations of gossiping and arbitrarily getting off with each other. They’re not simply voted off the show at the end of each episode, of course – they are murdered in horrible ways. To tell you how exactly would strip Killer Camp of all its fun, but the murder sequences themselves are all completely gorgeous to look at; the tinny reality TV production values of the rest of the show ramped up to grimy video nasty levels. Some of them are a little silly – you’ll never look at a nude statue in the same way again – but that doesn’t detract from how purely entertaining they are.
To my mind Release the Hounds still tops Killer Camp, with the moments of horror here a little sparser than I would have liked. A series like this could be a sustained exercise in creeping tension, but there are moments in Killer Camp where you could be watching any generic reality show, and that’s a shame. But these moments are worth enduring because, when it fires on all cylinders, it is terrific television.
Better yet, now we’re in the clutches of a horror boom, there’s plenty of potential to make these horror gameshows and tried and true genre. Wouldn’t you watch a gameshow based on It Follows, where contestants are patiently hunted down by a slow-moving zombie? Wouldn’t you watch a gameshow set in the nightmarishly picturesque world of Midsommar? It might exceed an ITV2 budget, but a gameshow based on Us – where unsuspecting contestants are bedevilled by their own evil doppelgangers – has the potential to be the best gameshow ever made. Killer Camp is very good indeed, but next Halloween I want to be terrified.
Killer Camp is on ITV2, 9pm, Sunday to Thursday
