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Fear Factor goes scripted and vertical, and Fox hired microdrama crews to make it

Fox and Endemol Shine are making a scripted Fear Factor horror series as 30 three-minute episodes for Holywater's My Drama. The crew comes from phone dramas, and nothing announced says AI will be used.

Drafted by The Generated · Filed by The Generated

It's prep week on a remote horror TV set, and a practical effects artist and her crew switch on a haunted fortune-telling machine that starts forcing them into personal death trials. That is the logline for a new scripted horror series inspired by Fear Factor, the dare show that ran for seven seasons on NBC.

Fox Entertainment Studios and Endemol Shine North America announced it on Tuesday: 30 episodes of about three minutes each, made for phones, premiering on Holywater's My Drama app. There is no title, cast, budget or premiere date yet.

The hires are the real story. The writers, Thom Woodley and Andrew Beck, run Hudson Vertical, a small New York studio that makes short phone series. Director Gabriel Caste lists work for the phone drama apps DramaBox and DramaWave, and the producers run Visionary Vertical Productions in Vancouver. A famous format went to people who learned their craft on fast, cheap phone serials.

Fox says Fear Factor is the first unscripted franchise to make the leap into scripted storytelling. That needs an asterisk, because Endemol's 2008 zombie series Dead Set was scripted horror set inside the Big Brother house.

Nothing announced says AI will be used on the series. Holywater has said AI on My Drama is used mainly after the shoot and to adapt shows for other countries, and Fox, which owns a stake in Holywater, has promised more than 200 phone series for the app.

Our take: Fear Factor isn't an AI story yet, but it shows phone drama crews can now carry network shows, and that is the market AI makers want into.

Source: Deadline, TheWrap and Variety, Oct 27, 2026; Holywater interview with Behind the Verticals, Feb 2026.

Read the full article: thegenerated.com/stories/fear-factor-scripted-microdrama-my-drama-20261028

Provenance — Variety; Deadline; TheWrap; Behind the Verticals, Holywater interview · Status: verified: MEDIUM (Variety + Deadline + TheWrap; non-AI deal, linked line below)
Fox and Endemol Shine turn Fear Factor into a scripted horror series for phones
Film

An all-AI essay film premiered at Turkey's oldest festival. Next week it competes at Cottbus

Vikki Bardot's 79-minute essay film was made with AI image, voice and music tools, and the models are still unnamed. It got into Turkey's oldest festival and Cottbus's main competition the way indie films do, through a distributor and programmers. The 'first ever' label doesn't hold: the same studio's Post Truth was in Fantasporto's main competition in February.

Drafted by The Generated · Filed by The Generated
Directors Alkan Avcıoğlu, holding a microphone, and Gizem Avcıoğlu (Vikki Bardot) standing before the screen at the Antalya Golden Orange Q&A for A Woman Asleep

At 21:30 on Monday 26 October, the AKM Perge hall at the Antalya Golden Orange Film Festival screened a 79-minute film in which every image, the narrator's voice and the music came out of AI tools. When the lights came up, Gizem Avcıoğlu and her husband and co-writer Alkan Avcıoğlu stood in front of the screen for a Q&A. She told the audience that the production was made entirely with AI tools, and that she had written and edited it with him, drawing on her own life.

The film is A Woman Asleep (Uyuyan Kadın), credited to Vikki Bardot, the name Avcıoğlu works under abroad. It played as a National Gala title at the festival's 63rd edition, with two more screenings on 27 and 30 October. Next week it moves up a level: it is one of 10 films in the main feature competition at FilmFestival Cottbus in Germany, running 3 to 8 November, in the same lineup as new work from Radu Jude and Kantemir Balagov.

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That’s all of Film today.

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