Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction?/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Nightmare Fuel: If they're not Glurge, most episodes fall under this. Major offenders include the stories "Red-Eyed Creature" and "The Mirror of Truth". To elaborate:
    • In "Red-Eyed Creature", a couple, their young son, and their nanny purchase a new home. On the night they move in, the young son goes downstairs, and in the dark kitchen, witnesses a pair of ominous red eyes floating towards him, accompanied by a disturbingly loud whooshing sound. The parents think the frightened son just imagined the whole thing, until the same thing happens to the wife some time later. When the father inspects the house, he notices that the panel of the family's thermostat on the wall has two red lights that could easily be mistaken for glowing red eyes in the dark, and postulates that the whooshing sound was just the heater kicking in. The parents are relieved by this rational explanation, but the son remains unconvinced. When the son is in bed that night, the nanny goes to tuck him in and reassures him that there's nothing to be afraid of. As she leaves the son's room, she pauses, faces the audience, and her eyes glow red and emit a whooshing sound, implying that she's some sort of supernatural entity intent on terrorizing the family.
      • Of course, she might be a supernatural creature who looks scary but is otherwise a nice person.
    • In the "Mirror of Truth," a vain, shallow woman obsessed with her appearance enters a beauty parlor and is given a makeover. Dissatisfied with the results, she treats the beautician with rude indignation, and in response the beautician apparently casts a curse upon her. Although we never see her face, the woman believes her good looks are rapidly fading, and soon states that she finds herself grotesquely ugly. In The Reveal, she looks into a mirror, and her reflection shows a hideously deformed face. When we see the woman's actual face, her youthful, photogenic appearance remains, it was only that the curse caused her to perceive herself as ugly. The deformed face is Nightmare Fuel at its finest, especially since you're not expecting it.
    • The reveals. Seeing FACT or FICTION stamped over the creepiest screenshots of each segment and holding it for a few seconds was rather nightmare-inducing.
    • "The Land" is about a farmer who is about to lose his land because of a long drought and makes a deal with someone(and to the writers credit, it's not implied to be The Devil or some demonic entity, just some guy who lives in town) for the land to be fertile for the next twenty years. The next day his family wakes up to find that it is indeed fertile, and the man is heavily implied to have become the land itself. The imagery in this story is creepy.
  • Crowning Music of Awesome: The spooky music played throughout each episode greatly amplifies the eerie atmosphere of the show.
  • Fridge Logic: Many stories include details that could only be known by the person involved and are thus impossible for us to have knowledge of if he or she dies or disappears as a result of the events of the story. Similarly, if there are details that are revealed to the audience but never to any character, how did the show's writers know about them? Fridge Brilliance if the story is revealed to be fictional, Fridge Logic if it's purportedly true.
    • One example where a story like that turned out to be true had a woman who was hit by a car see her dead aunt as she's lying there, dying. There was no indication in the segment that she said to any bystanders, "Oh my gosh, as I am dying I am seeing the ghost of my dead aunt and here is what she's saying to me!" Because of the instances of Dan Browning mentioned above, one must take their claims of factuality with a grain of salt.
  • Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Beyond Belief was a relatively popular show in Germany during it's run, perhaps even more so than in it's parent country the United States.
  • High Octane Nightmare Fuel: The reveals. Seeing FACT or FICTION stamped over the scariest still shot in each story with a loud stamping sound had this impact.
    • Especially the ones that were revealed to be FACT.
  • Narm: The story "Cook Out." During a family barbecue, the grill malfunctions in strange ways long enough for a family member to learn that the meat is contaminated with e. coli. For no apparent reason, the family patriarch attributes the malfunctioning to divine intervention by a recently deceased uncle.
    • Even though it was a pretty creepy and well told story, The Hooded Chair(which is based on the Busby Stoop Chair in Thirsk, England) has an ending which is incredibly narmy.

Talbot: I will not be destroyed by a chair!

  • Periphery Demographic: Even if you're a skeptic who doesn't buy into the supposedly truthful supernatural elements, enjoying the show is still very possible if you just find the stories entertaining.
  • Recycled Script: A large number of stories follow this basic formula: the spirit of a dead person warns someone of an impending doom, rescues someone in danger, or exacts revenge on the person who killed them. Another common theme is an apparently inanimate object coming to life (an animatronic gorilla, mannequins, a wax figure, a rubber hand, a doll). The show's final season was replete with rehashes of previous stories, perhaps constituting the moment the series Jumped the Shark.
    • There was one story about a girl who goes into a graveyard on a bet and accidentally pins herself to the grave with a knife, causing herself to die of fright. Or whatever. This was the exact plot of an episode of The Twilight Zone. The original one.
    • To be fair, that story is itself a somewhat-old urban legend. It's also in the book Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark.
  • Sturgeon's Law: Let's face it, many of the stories are lame. It's the awesome ones that makes the show worth watching.
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