Adam Curtis connects the rise of supernatural-based shows in the UK to reality television today, focusing on a forerunner to the Blair Witch Project (1999):
Ghostwatch was transmitted on Halloween 1992. It was quite obvious from both the introduction and the titles that it was a work of fiction. But the reaction was astonishing – thousands of people rang in – either terrified or angry or to report that they were experiencing paranormal activity in their house at that very moment.
The next day there was a media storm – and the BBC reacted in its normal courageous way by burying the programme and disowning it. The Radio Times was apparently told never to mention it ever again. And [Ghostwatch creator Stephen] Volk has described how it was like being airbrushed out of a photograph in Stalinist Russia. But the extraordinary reaction rather proved the central aim of the drama.
It demonstrated the truth about modern television – that we all know that increasingly the line between fiction and non-fiction is blurred on TV. But far from making us distrust television this actually makes it more powerful. It possesses our imagination more powerfully precisely because we don't know what is real and what is not.
The Dish 