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Prepare for Scare Tactics With These 5 Terrifying Pranks Through History
The pranks on Scare Tactics are scary, but hopefully not as scary as some of these terrifying historical pranks.
The new Scare Tactics series may be premiering on USA Network just in time for spooky season, but the Jordan Peele-produced show is a very deliberate balance between scary and silly. The unwitting prankees on the show might scream bloody murder, but at the end of the prank, the goal is for everybody to have a good laugh.
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Not every prank in history strikes that balance, though. There have been lots of pranks that were, perhaps, a little too scary. Ahead of the October 4 premiere of Scare Tactics on USA Network, let’s look back at some of the scariest pranks in history — ranked from vaguely spooky to spine-chillingly terrifying.
Richard Branson’s UFO
In 1989, billionaire Richard Branson pulled off an extra-incredible extra-terrestrial prank for April Fools Day. Branson got in a hot air balloon shaped like a UFO and flew the faux-flying saucer around London. This caused a bit of a stir when local news stations reported on the literal unidentified flying object. Branson exacerbated things even more when they landed.
“The police surrounded us and then sent one lone policeman with his truncheon across the field to greet the alien,” Branson explained at the time. “The UFO’s door opened very slowly, with plenty of dry ice billowing from it. E.T. (OK, somebody in an E.T. costume!) walked down the platform towards the policeman. He quickly spun around and sprinted off back where he had come from!”
Though the police initially threatened to arrest Branson and Co., they soon saw the fun in the whole escapade.
After all, there have been much scarier UFO pranks, as we will soon see...
The Twilight Prank
During the filming of the iconic The Twilight Zone episode “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” star William Shatner pulled a terrifying prank on the great Richard Donner, who directed the episode.
The episode features Shatner as an airplane passenger with a fear of flying — a fear that’s made worse when he sees a gremlin on the wing pulling the plane apart and nobody will believe him. The episode was filmed in an airplane that was on the ground rather than in the sky, but its wings were still pretty high up. Actor Edd Byrnes, who happened to be visiting the set, conspired with Shatner to scare Donner.
"I hear this screaming and yelling and everything, and I run back and I see [Byrnes and Shatner] fighting,” the late director recalled in an interview with the Archive of American Television. “And then they went behind the body of the airplane, and all of a sudden, I see Shatner fall off the wing and fall all the way to the bottom … it’s concrete … and he hit the ground. I thought he was dead, man.”
(Luckily for everybody involved, the pranking pair had merely tossed a dummy off the wing. Shatner was fine.)
Trick, No Treat
The phrase “trick or treat” has lost a lot of meaning these days. It’s just something costumed kids say before they get candy, rather than an earnest threat. At worst, modern Halloween “tricks” consist of egging houses or the throwing of toilet paper. However, when the holiday first came to the United States from Scotland in the 1800s, it was a much more serious — and scary — time for pranks.
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As The History Channel explained, there were enough terrifying early Halloween pranks that this list could be nothing but them. Some of the pranks include tricking a railway engineer with a fake body laid out on the tracks in front of his speeding locomotive, waxing streetcar tracks in Kansas City so that it caused an accident that seriously injured a conductor, and scaring a Logansport, Indiana, woman to death when she opened her door only to have a scary green jack-o-lantern greeting her. The danger went both ways, as in 1907 a man in Tucson, Arizona, pulled a revolver and fatally shot a prankster who was trying to trip pedestrians with a hidden wire.
Halloween eventually became more of a spooky, candy-filled affair rather than a night of mayhem when major cities — whose leaders realized they couldn’t expect a ban on the holiday to be successful — encouraged just bribing kids with treats instead.
Dante’s Prank
An erupting volcano is no joke. Just ask the residents of ancient Pompeii. (Oh right, you can’t.)
Despite — or perhaps because of — how scary volcanos are, there have been at least two occasions when pranksters have convinced people that they’re in danger of an imminent eruption. In the leadup to April Fool’s Day in 1974, a resident of Sitka, Alaska, named Porky Bickar had flown hundreds of old tires and stashed them in the crater of Mt. Edgecumbe, an extinct volcano about 13 miles away from the town. On the 1st, he lit the tires on fire, causing a billow of black smoke that tricked the town’s residents into thinking the volcano had come back to life and was about to blow.
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Six years later — a week after the very real eruption of Mt. Saint Helens killed 57 people and caused billions of dollars worth of damage — the Massachusetts TV station WNAC-TV decided to pull an April Fools prank that was in decidedly poor taste. The broadcast claimed that Great Blue Hill in the town of Milton was erupting, and the broadcast used stock footage of the Mt. Saint Helens eruption and edited footage of President Jimmy Carter to make the total bogus disaster look real. It caused a bit of a panic, to say the least. As a consequence, the producer of the 6 o'clock news who came up with the prank was fired, and the FCC established new regulations about properly identifying stock footage.
The War of the Worlds Broadcast
The infamous Orson Welles radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds in 1938 was not intended to trick listeners, nor did it actually spark massive, nationwide panic. It was simply a radio play that used the medium to great effect. And while it no doubt spooked and unwittingly tricked some listeners, it was not a chaos-causing prank as it’s often remembered.
The same cannot be said of one of the many adaptations of the iconic broadcast.
In February 1949, Radio Quito in Quito, Ecuador, broadcast a Spanish-language version of The War of the Worlds. If the Welles broadcast unwittingly set off a minor panic because it accidentally tricked people into thinking it was a real news broadcast, the Radio Quito version seemed like it was deliberately upping the verisimilitude in the hopes of fooling people. This broadcast did set off a panic that turned into anger when the broadcast was revealed to be a hoax. A riot ensued, and seven people died. The radio station wouldn’t be back on the air for two years following the broadcast, and one of the people behind the show — whose girlfriend and nephew died during the riot — fled the country for the rest of his life.
When does Scare Tactics premiere?
Scare Tactics is scheduled to premiere on USA Network on Friday, October 4 at 10 p.m. ET. The debut episode will also air simultaneously across Bravo, SYFY, and E!
