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Scare Tactics EP Explains Picking the Perfect Pranks & the Most Surprising Common Reaction
"You want to be surprised, otherwise, you’re not making good TV," executive producer Elan Gale told USA Insider.
All season, USA Network's Scare Tactics reboot has been asking its victims and audience alike to expect the unexpected. So it shouldn't be a surprise that even with the most carefully crafted pranks possible at their disposal, the creators were sometimes caught off-guard, too.
"I was shocked at the number of people who found out they were on Scare Tactics and were just a little disappointed that was the only time they get to be on Scare Tactics," executive producer Elan Gale told USA Insider ahead of the finale, which premieres December 6 at 10/9c.
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"It’s tricky," he added. "Because obviously, you can’t do it more than once. I think if you knew that it was potentially a movie or a TV show that you were in, you might have enjoyed it more. You would have really leaned into the terror. Fortunately [or] unfortunately, it’s in that weird space where there’s just 30, 45 seconds, a minute where the world doesn’t make sense, and that’s just kind of a cool human experience, which is why I think that we were lucky to have so many people who were excited to be on the show."
Designing Scare Tactics: The roller coaster theory
This season of Scare Tactics — which Jordan Peele and the folks at Monkeypaw Productions rebooted from the beloved 2000s SYFY series — saw cat people attack, a hospital exorcism go horribly wrong, and much, much more. In fact, the variety of pranks is so extensive that we needed to get the bottom of what, exactly, goes into designing these pranks in the first place.
RELATED: This Scare Tactics Prankster Accidentally Unlocked Her Own Phobia with Epic Cat Prank
"Every single scare is different and the process of how we get there is different, but generally speaking, it starts off as a pretty wide idea," Gale explained.
The first step is to figure out the type of scare. Creature-based? Buckets of blood? How about something like the "Death's Table" prank, which relied on peer pressure?
"There’s lots of little moments, there’s lots of different ways, and there’s lots of different kinds of scares. And I think once we decided the kind of scare, then we would talk about, 'What’s the scare delivery device?'" Gale continued. "Is it quiet? Is it very loud? Is it a sudden movement from somewhere? Is it something popping up? Or is it a slow, creeping tension and horror? And then once we figure out the delivery device, we try to write a story that we would see as a short film that had a beginning, middle, and end if we shot it without that target, without actually [pranking someone]."
RELATED: Scare Tactics' "Cursed Collection" Prankster Got Freaked Out By Her Own Setup
Then the challenge became leaving "enough space for anything to happen within the confines of the story." Adding raw human reaction to the mix makes for a few surprises along the way.
"Because many of these things went in a direction we had no anticipation for," Gale said. "Which is what you want, right? You want to be surprised, otherwise, you’re not making good TV… But we really worked and tried to figure out the kinds of scares that would be the most effective and the most enjoyable in the interim ... for the person that we’re scaring."
Gale compared a good Scare Tactics scare to a roller coaster.
"You definitely want to scream, you definitely want to be scared, but you never want to feel like you’re actually going to fly off the tracks," he said. "And when you get to the end, you want to say, 'Let’s do this again!'"
Keeping Things Light
That lighthearted view was the team's North Star. Because Scare Tactics' ultimate goal is laughs.
"I think Jordan famously said the difference between horror and comedy is music, and when you look at something like Scare Tactics, it can be ingested as horror or as comedy and I think we all felt the comedy was the top line for this series," Gale said.
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"There’s only so much you can do in an unscripted space because these are real people and you can’t really terrify anyone ... to [the extent] we are used to seeing in a horror capacity," he added, laughing. "And so making sure we’re laughing and also making sure they're laughing at the end — that was the thing is that we wanted to have a light-hearted vibe on the set and not take people to a place of abject terror as much as confronting the absurdity of modern life. And if you approach that too much as horror, it’s depressing, and so you just go comedy, baby!"
The Scare Tactics finale premieres on December 6, 2024, at 10/9c.
Scare Tactics is available to watch on USA Network and Peacock.
