'Fear Itself'

There is no arguing with horror. People like to be scared and will pay good money for it, and though it is common enough to regard the more egregious products of the genre as potentially the end of civilization -- I often do myself -- it has been not ending civilization for quite some time now.

It's been nearly 100 years since the first film version of "Frankenstein," which was written nearly 100 years before that. But Sophocles knew something way back when about the shock ending and the use of blood. (Oedipus puts out his own eyes -- how cool is that?) Dante's trip through hell is a road map for the kind of payback that is at the heart of the contemporary ghost story. Shakespeare did good things with spirits, not always friendly. The Book of Revelation -- Hollywood steals from that all the time.

Given so much history, there is little new in "Fear Itself," an appropriately numbered 13-episode anthology series that begins tonight on NBC. As seems the rule under network honcho Ben Silverman, it revives the corpse of an earlier series, in this case Showtime's "Masters of Horror," brought to you by the same team. (Or most of it: Creator Mick Garris left "Fear Itself" after non-union Canadian writers tweaked scripts in his strike-mandated absence.) But its line goes back farther than that, to "The Twilight Zone" and "The Outer Limits" and their remakes, to "Alfred Hitchcock Presents," "Tales From the Darkside," "Amazing Stories," and elsewhere. There is usually a monster somewhere on television.

The series is offered as a kind of all-star conclave of suspense specialists, including directors Mary Harron ("American Psycho"), John Landis ("An American Werewolf in London"), Darren Bousman (three "Saw" films), John Dahl ("The Last Seduction") and Stuart Gordon ("Re-Animator"). That will mean more to some than to others. It's a little difficult to judge the whole on the basis of the three episodes made available for review, when each is different enough to suggest that something unpredictably great may be coming later. (That is perhaps whistling in the dark.) What they do have in common is wintry Canadian weather, a general lack of humor without having much serious to say and the fact that they are not particularly scary. And I am not hard to scare.