Upbeat nature documentary maker Dr. Emmet Cole (Bruce Greenwood), a Steve Irwin type who never saw a creature, tribe or situation he didn’t find fascinating, heads up the Amazon River—and vanishes. He’s presumed dead for two years, until hints that he’s still alive send his wife (Leslie Hope), son (Joe Anderson) and a new documentary crew in search of him. What they find is most unnatural indeed, with an invisible force killing one of the group before the others can do anything.

Welcome to THE RIVER, ABC’s new found-footage horror-explorer drama, created by PARANORMAL ACTIVITY auteur Oren Peli and PARANORMAL 2 co-scripter Michael R. Perry, with Steven Spielberg as a key executive producer. Like the PARANORMAL films, THE RIVER is viewed entirely through the lenses of cameras on the scene; it begins with a two-hour pilot tonight (airing at 9/8 Central), followed by seven more hour-long installments on consecutive Tuesday nights.

Zack Estrin, one of THE RIVER’s executive producers and showrunner with Michael Green, explains why he feels the documentary aspect is essential to the series: “When you’re watching the show, you aren’t just seeing people react—you’re actually having the [characters who are] filmmakers themselves react, because those camera guys are getting scared just the same as everybody else. I think that has a much bigger impression on the audience.”

Feature filmmaker Gary Fleder, who directed THE RIVER’s season finale, says, “Audiences have gotten so smart in understanding the language of reality television—good reality television and bad reality television—that it’s part of the fun of doing a scripted show where you’re taking that language and bringing it into a narrative.” Fleder, whose big-screen credits include KISS THE GIRLS, DON’T SAY A WORD and IMPOSTOR, adds, “This was the first time I’d worked on [a regular TV episode for another producer] in almost 10 years. I’ve done either pilots or episodes of shows I’ve produced, and movies. But I have an overall deal with ABC as a producer and director, so doing THE RIVER was fun; it was great to walk into a show where it already had its momentum, creatively and aesthetically.”

To prepare for his RIVER episode, Fleder watched the pilot, helmed by ORPHAN and HOUSE OF WAX director Jaume Collet-Serra. “He did a great job of keeping it a documentary when it should be,” Fleder says, “but also, it felt accessible. It looked really good, it was well-photographed, it was very well-cast. THE RIVER was challenging, because where does the camera want to be intuitively, and then how do you make that camera not work in a perfect way? [If the shots look perfect], it betrays the conceit. It’s almost like if you’re a really good musician or singer and you’re doing karaoke; how do you entertain people without being too good [laughs]? It was about not being too perfect, not being too seamless. It was the challenge of using the lexicon of the style of the show while not being too perfect.”

Estrin says that he and fellow showrunner Green divide their RIVER tasks equally. “We work completely together. What’s nice is, because there are two of us, we can do different things simultaneously. So if one of us in the [writers’] room, one of us is in the editing room. If one of us is on the set, one of us is rewriting the script. It is catch-all, catch-all. We are completely doing it.” As for Peli’s involvement, “He’s also a really busy guy. He has his movies going on, but he reads every script, he has input on the cuts, the whole thing.”

Estrin previously worked on PRISON BREAK, and while THE RIVER would seem to be an entirely different animal, he finds a lot to compare between the two. “Tension and scares often get viewed as different things,” he notes, “but to me, they’re really the same. The tension of being caught by a prison guard is the same as the tension of being caught or chased by a ghost. It’s all about scares and being worried about the possible potential conclusion.”

Of course, one generally has a better idea of what to do when pursued by a guard than being cornered by a paranormal entity. “Which is great!” Estrin says. “That’s just the next evolution of it, right? [Horror] is a genre I used to love growing up, but my wife unfortunately does not like scares, so now when I watch those movies, I have to put them on my iPad or watch them in my office, because she’s not into them at all. For this show, she wants to read all the scripts before she sees the [episodes] so she can get prepared for them. But I’m always up for something that’s not [elsewhere already] on TV, and I feel this is something that has never been done on television before, and is a great challenge.”

THE RIVER, according to Fleder, “fluctuates between horror and the fantastical. There’s a vérité style to it; it’s similar to films like BLAIR WITCH, if there was a real attempt at characterizations and relationships. In fact, the [episode] I did, a lot of relationships that have been sort of bubbling and brewing come to a head. There’s a real tendency to blend all the thriller ideas on this show with giving the people dimension.”

The remaining people, that is. Estrin explains that THE RIVER won’t be shy about killing off characters: “As another [reporter] pointed out, if you can’t have a body count, you don’t have any real threat. And that’s another thing on PRISON BREAK—we killed people off. We killed off one character twice,” he recalls with a laugh. “That’s the only way to go to get an audience’s trust, so that they won’t doubt you’ll do something like that at a moment’s notice.”

Given its frequent high mortality rate, the found-footage format always begs the question of just who it is who found the footage, and why they’ve cut it together for others to see. According to Fleder, the audience may get some answers this time around. “À la LOST, there’s going to be mythology at some point that involves a big reveal of which person or persons found the footage and cut it together. I don’t have that information, and if I did, I wouldn’t tell you,” he laughs.

The pilot for THE RIVER was shot in Puerto Rico, but the rest of the series was done in Hawaii, largely on the island of Oahu. Estrin says the fact that ABC had spent six years making LOST there was a great boon. “They already owned stages there. Actually, we used the stages from [ABC’s medical drama] OFF THE MAP, [which filmed there] the previous year. ABC has an infrastructure already set up there and ready to go, and the Hawaii film community, because of LOST, because of HAWAII FIVE-0, because of movies like THE DESCENDANTS that have been filmed there—there’s a really great crew base. You don’t have to bring everybody in, like you would if, say, if you went into Colombia or Costa Rica to film.”

The RIVER crew also found shooting locations that sound like they have real-life connections to the show’s subject matter. Series regular Daniel Zacapa (pictured below), who plays boat mechanic Emilio Valenzuela, reveals that some sequences were lensed “at this abandoned mental hospital for children that closed in the early ’70s. It was so bad, and these were mentally challenged children, and the director of that hospital was so evil—he was doing things with children that were unspeakable—that the nurses got together and cut off his head. I swear to God, it’s documented. There’s a cemetery next to the hospital, and there were energies flying all over the place while we were shooting, phenomena that were just creepy. One of our main actors broke his leg, several of the cast members had huge gouges in their arms, they got cut. Lighting equipment fell—it was weird.”

For Estrin, though, “What scares me is the ‘nothing.’ And by that I mean the small sound that you don’t know what it is, lying in bed and hearing a ticking outside the window and you think it’s a branch, but you’re afraid to get up and open the window and check. It’s the anticipation, it’s the wondering. I’m not so scared of a person being in my house, I’m scared of knowing that there’s a person outside who’s thinking about coming into my house, because that is the moment when the fear is there. Those are very, very different moments, and that’s the difference between the horror in a movie like SAW and the scares in a movie like PARANORMAL ACTIVITY. This is a family show that has scares like POLTERGEIST. You don’t want to watch it alone, certainly.”

Sound, Estrin adds, is a big part of the fear quotient on THE RIVER. “We worked with our sound designer to come up with unique voices for these different scares each week. Paula Fairfield, who [worked on the sound design] for PREDATORS and for LOST, has been helping us. She creates a unique feel to these scares that have the right amount of rattle and other things.”

Estrin and Fleder agree that THE RIVER is stronger on atmosphere than onscreen grue for a number of reasons. “That’s by our own choice,” Estrin says, “but also, we’re on network television. We can bleep things, and we’ve actually done some stuff that’s truly gory, but what we do is what a regular documentary [shown on network TV] would do—we blur it out. It’s left up to your imagination.”

For network TV, there also is such a thing as too frightening, as Fleder explains: “I did the pilot for HAPPY TOWN, which was really great, but it was so scary that we ended up sort of mitigating and paring it back a bit for the final air version.” Asked to define “paring it back,” Fleder replies, “It meant playing with the sound mix, pulling shots, reconceiving the scene. It might mean reshooting the scene, too. It’s fun to see network television and cable—there’s this cross-pollination and similarity, but also, a lot of times you see things evolving and pushing the envelope. I think we’re seeing a lot of network TV looking at what’s happening in cable and trying to use what’s great about it—casting-wise, tonally, aesthetically, taking a few risks.”

Estrin hopes audiences will respond to the risks of THE RIVER. “I feel like between the visual style and the characters, this is something that will feel more real than surreal. We are going for a reality-based scare, as opposed to camera tricks and special effects.”

In conclusion, Estrin says, “I’m incredibly proud of the show. I feel this is something special and magical and different, and really gets better as the season goes along, and I hope that people embrace our attempt to do groundbreaking TV.”

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MOVIES/TV - Fearful Features