A closer look
The BBC decided Halloween of 1992 was the perfect time to convince the British public that poltergeists were murdering beloved children's TV presenters. Shot as a live documentary, Ghostwatch terrified viewers so thoroughly that the Broadcasting Standards Commission officially ruled in 1994 that it had inflicted psychological damage on the nation's youth. The BBC locked it in a vault for over a decade, finally learning the hard way that you shouldn't inflict a War of the Worlds panic on an audience of impressionable pre-teens.
