Fear Factor is trading real-life stunts for supernatural terror. Fox Entertainment Studios and Endemol Shine North America are turning the reality television franchise into an original scripted horror series, and its first fictional nightmare involves a haunted fortune-telling machine that forces its victims into personalized death trials.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, The currently untitled project will be a vertical microdrama consisting of 30 episodes, each running approximately three minutes. It will premiere exclusively on Holywater Tech’s My Drama platform, with FOX Entertainment Global handling worldwide distribution. A release date has not been announced.
The story takes place during prep week on a remote horror television set, where a practical-effects artist and her crew accidentally unleash the sinister machine. The survivors must uncover its tragic origins before it claims everyone they love. Rather than asking contestants to eat something disgusting or face their worst physical fears, this version of Fear Factor puts its characters inside a fictional horror story where the consequences could be fatal.
The project marks a major departure for the franchise. According to Fox, it will be the first time an unscripted television franchise has expanded into original scripted storytelling. It will also be the first horror series for My Drama, which has primarily offered other genres, including vampire and werewolf romances.
The creative team includes writers Thom Woodley and Andrew Beck, director Gabriel Caste, and producers Ian Nsenga and Yuliia Vyshnevska. Although Holywater describes itself as an AI-first company, the Fear Factor microdrama will be a physical production rather than an AI-generated series.
Hannah Pillemer, head of scripted at Fox Entertainment Studios, said the strong response to Fear Factor: House of Fearhelped open the door to the new project. She explained that the franchise’s focus on fear and the lengths people will go to confront it provided the foundation for an original horror narrative.
Michael Heyerman, executive vice president of unscripted series at Endemol Shine North America, also pointed to the growing appeal of vertical storytelling. The format is designed for mobile screens, with short installments delivering serialized stories in a compact viewing experience.
The new series builds on Fox’s current revival of the franchise, Fear Factor: House of Fear, hosted by Johnny Knoxville. That version returned the property to network television with a new group of contestants facing dangerous challenges and a social-strategy element. Fox has renewed House of Fear for a second season, making this scripted spinoff another way to extend the brand beyond its traditional reality competition format.
Fox also has an equity stake in Holywater, the company behind My Drama, and has been expanding its presence in mobile-first entertainment. The partnership gives the network another opportunity to bring established intellectual property to audiences who consume serialized stories on their phones.
For now, the new Fear Factor horror series has no official title or premiere date. But with a cursed machine, a remote production set, and a crew facing personalized death trials, the franchise is moving well beyond its familiar reality-TV formula. Viewers will have to wait to find out how the story unfolds, and whether this experiment can turn a long-running competition brand into a new kind of horror series.
