'Escape the Night' - Episodes 1 & 2: 'The Clowns Here Kill'

escape the night, joey graceffa, season 3

YouTube saves the world?

Escape the Night is among the most unique of YouTube premium's shows, as well as the most difficult to explain.

The show sees a cast of YouTubers invited by Joey Graceffa, star and creator of the show, to dress up in glamorous costumes and join him in the 1970s. Then they find themselves trapped in a dangerous world with monsters, mayhem and a mission: to save the world by sunrise. And to do so, they must solve puzzles and vote their friends into challenges where one is eliminated as a sacrifice to their mission.

Having watched seasons one and two, I will admit that some of the show’s core mechanics have lost their dramatic impact. As Graceffa says himself in Part 2 of the season premiere, The Clowns Here Kill, voting your friends in to die doesn’t make the same impact if you’re casting your twentieth vote. The drama is fresh for the new cast, but not for long-time viewers.

What is new

What is fresh, though, is the bold move from the aesthetic of the previous seasons. The first two seasons took place in mansions in the 1920s and the Victorian Era respectively, the realms of Agatha Christie’s Poirot and Jack the Ripper. This season, they’ve broken their own cozy-mystery boundaries and leaped into the groovy 1970s with a town-wide carnival.

The cast

A word on the cast: excitement. More words: this season's cast seems to have very big personalities that will surely lock horns with each other. MatPat of Game Theory and Film Theory seems pretty explosive, and the season sneak-peek at the end of the first episode seems to be setting him up as an antagonist of the group. But that's just a theory.

Final thoughts

The campiness of this season is less suffocating—and don’t get me wrong, I love a good, campy show, but the setting and scale of this season has balanced its inherent Scooby-Doo quality with a genuine curiosity for what horrors the carnival will reveal next.

Check out the free first episode of Escape the Night - 

Have you seen Escape the Night? What do you think about it? Share your thoughts below!

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