The new series premieres June 22.
Get ready to see your favorite digital stars in a whole new, scary light!
YouTube Red’s new series, Escape the Night, follows 10 online personalities, including Glozell Green, iJustine and Lele Pons, as they battle it out in a game of life or death. Only ET was on set of the murder mystery/reality competition hybrid, which came from the mind of Joey Graceffa, who also hosts.
“It all started when I wanted to do a dinner party, like a murder mystery party, with just my friends,” Joey explains. “And then I was like, oh! It would be cool if I put up cameras around the room while it was happening. Then, I wanted to make it bigger, and bigger.”
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The competition transports the stars back to the 1920s -- they all wear period costumes, and have Prohibition era-inspired identities, as they attempt to make it out of Joey’s inherited (and haunted!) estate alive.
“Basically, the storyline is I inherited this mansion and now I'm throwing a dinner party as a warm welcoming of my new place,” Joey says. “So the guests arrive, then horror strikes at dinner! And then the games begin.”
“You may be digging up dead bodies,” director Adam Lawson teases. “You may get stabbed. It's really interesting.”
On each episode, one of the digital stars will get “killed off” for failing at that week’s challenge. Each challenge is inspired by a mystery tied to the inherited mansion.
“You can expect a lot of body parts,” Lele Pons deadpans. “Like, detached from the body. You can expect explosions. You can expect... let me see, deaths. A lot of suspense, and I'm telling you, it's not scripted, so we don't know what's going on.”
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“As an audience member, you're going to experience what feels like a scripted TV show for a moment,” Adam adds. “Then you'll be taken into the world and interacting with it. And then you'll see people who you love, YouTube celebrities... you're going to see them do things they've never done.”
“I might've thrown one of my good friends under the bus,” Justine ‘iJustine’ Ezarik jokes.
“There's gonna be a lot of scares,” Joey promises. “You're gonna see your favorites YouTubers so scared and peeing their pants and... just seeing really crazy, fun reactions from them.”
“[I was] scared to death,” GloZell recalls. “Now you're knowing that she was really terrified through the whole thing.”
Escape the Night premieres exclusively on YouTube Red, the new ad-free subscription service, on June 22. Get a look at another YouTube Red original series, SING IT!, in the video below.