Your Worst Nightmare

The cases are stories worth telling. The problem is in the storytelling itself. While some of the presentation is professional and respectful, there are always 2-3 moments in each episode where that is thrown out the window and the show resorts to cheap fake-outs, spooky sound effects, and scare tactics stolen from horror movies. And while that works for shock value, it's really unfair to the victims and their families to go overboard with it.

The second and third episodes of Season 3 were particularly bad with this technique.

The one defense of using these horror film techniques is that it does a terrific job of conveying the "worst nightmare" scenarios that the victims felt. For that, I think it's worth watching.

...the last few have veered off of what made it enjoyable. It seems like they are all "the bad guy likes the victim and gets turned down so he comes back and kills her" or the "girl's significant other turns out to be a psycho". Let's get a little variety going, please.

And the absolute worst change (in my personal opinion) is the fact that they're now skewing the story so that any man in the victim's life "might" be the bad guy. Some random dude she saw at the gas station who ends up having nothing to do with the story, let's harp on that for ten minutes. The make it seem all sinister. Sometimes it's okay to let the bad guy be the bad guy from the beginning. I don't need two other men who have nothing to do with anything shoehorned into the plot for drama's sake.

Seriously, binge the show and count them. Sometimes there's several in the same episode. Like most shows of this type from Discovery ID, otherwise decent acting and solid production values are undermined by the cornball nature of it all.

The cases they choose are good and they seem to have picked some very horrible murders. The acting though is terrible. Very campy acting, that almost feels like it's intentional. It's part of the appeal I think.

Because it's true crime you know something awful is going to happen and it builds up like a low budget made for TV movie. It's a shame that the first season isn't available in Discovery UK.

I have given it six stars as the production isn't bad and the stories are good.

Season 2 Episode 3 has a guy with the craziest wig. Does anyone know whether a new season will be coming out at all? Let's hope so.

I love true crime and documentaries like these shows. This one is one of my favorites! The title is pretty self explanatory, as many of these stories would be someone's worst nightmare!

In a sense, it is a little full of horror tropes and cliches, which is why I knocked my score down a little lower, but I'm serious! They really knew which stories to include in this series.

There are several episodes on here that I have rewatched a lot, such as "When the Lights Go Out" and "Bump in the Night". Those two episodes are creepy even without having a horror atmosphere. The stories alone are scary enough. Those cases would be someone's worst nightmare I would think.

I plan to watch the whole series, but I've only seen about a quarter so far. Out of all the other series on Investigation Discovery, this one is easily the most thrilling and intense. Highly recommend.