Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Make Me Scream’ on Prime Video, A Haunted House Sampler Without Many Scares

Make Me Scream, a special streaming on Prime Video, combines the playful sensibility of Halloween baking competition shows with channel-flipping through a bunch of horror marathons – but is it worth making your way through the whole house of horrors?.

MAKE ME SCREAM: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A spooky shot of the moon seen through some tangled branches gives way to jump-scare appearances from various costumed ghouls – a walk-through haunted house in miniature, which is basically what this small-screen endeavor is.

The Gist: Tempestt Bledsoe, best known for playing Vanessa Huxtable on The Cosby Show, and Darryl M. Bell, who played Ron Johnson on the Cosby Show spinoff A Different World, host an unusually elaborate Halloween party: They assemble a group featuring other celebs – including Jaleel White, forever known as Urkel on Family Matters; Harlem star Shoniqua Shandai; and rapper Lil Xan – and send them through a series of haunted mazes. Whichever two-person team accumulates the fewest screams (and other assorted penalties related to demonstrating fright) wins! Wins what, you may ask? A tricked-out skull necklace thing that looks like the stolen crown jewel of a Spirit Halloween. So yes, it’s all just for fun.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? No one’s baking anything, or showing off any particular skills beyond their professional affability, but the elaborate yet low-stakes costuming and set design brings to mind Halloween Baking Championship. In other words, the show exists to spend a particularly indulgent Halloween decoration budget for some celebrities who obviously enjoy spooky season.

Our Take: It sounds like a savvy idea on paper: Send a bunch of sorta-celebrities through a series of haunted mazes, and capture their competing attempts to avoid screaming, running, hiding, or closing their eyes (a weird penalty, to be honest; does blinking count?). And there’s no denying that Make Me Scream holds a certain basic, chummy appeal; who knew that Vanessa from The Cosby Show was so enthusiastic about Halloween? Despite all of the gnarled masks, creepy makeup, and goopy aliens, this is a pretty wholesome corner of the reality-show universe, with nothing more debasing than some semi-famous people temporarily and good-naturedly embarrassing themselves by reacting just how most normal people would react to a bunch of masked characters jumping out at them.

So why does Make Me Scream wear out its welcome around halfway through its modest 45 minutes? Mainly because it combines a lot of familiar elements without enhancing any of them. As a game show, it’s modest by design; when the teams must level up and face actual challenges, they’re exceedingly simple (Team Urkel has to find and pop five red balloons barely-hidden around a haunted-carnival set). As spookablast comedy, it never rises above mildly amusing to see the contestants react to the many costumed weirdos popping out at them – which makes sense, because visceral fear doesn’t really lend itself to great improv. Unfortunately, that visceral fear isn’t especially infections, either; it turns out that translating the live experience of walking through a Halloween Horror Nights-style attraction to television is not actually so simple. The show never really conveys the first-person experience of these various mazes, while also failing to give the audience a broader view of the obvious craft that went into creating them. Given that almost none of the jump scares that rattle the players actually translate to viewers, maybe it would have been more interesting for the show to offer behind-the-scenes glimpses at how these haunted mazes were assembled. Instead, the show offers pointless instant replays of reactions that aren’t really especially outsized (or impressively stoic). It’s like watching a close analysis of a sneeze. The fact that Bledsoe occasionally name-drops horror icons like Jigsaw and Freddy Kreuger as comparison points only makes this feel more off-brand by comparison. Inventive rip-offs and homages to classic horror are part of the fun of a real haunted house; watching them on TV just reminds you that you could be watching The Ring or The Shining instead.

Sex and Skin: None. No one’s pants are literally scared off.

Parting Shot: The winners celebrate with a bunch of costumed creepers – a Monster Mash that seems unlikely to continue past this one special.

Sleeper Star: None of the six would-be victims pop out with particularly funny or interesting reactions to their haunted-house tormentors, but Chris Williams, a veteran TV actor with a CV that includes Curb Your Enthusiasm, Silicon Valley, and Californication, among many others, makes an appealing team with Jaleel White.

Most Pilot-y Line: Technically, Make Me Scream isn’t introducing itself as the first episode in a series, but it very much has the old-school feel of a pilot that wasn’t actually picked up for a series and is now airing as a one-off – something the networks used to do semi-regularly, especially in the summer season.

Our Call: Look, this is not a major investment; it feels a little cruel to warn anyone off a single 45-minute special. But if you’re looking for something genuinely scary this Halloween, there are a hell of a lot of movies (or real-life haunted houses) that can give you better jolts in the same amount of time, and if you want a top-tier reality competition show, this isn’t it either. Unless you’ve already burned through everything on your Halloween queue, or have been longing for that Family Matters/Cosby Show crossover, SKIP IT.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.