ABC’s new series The River debuted last night with a two-hour installment designed to give viewers a taste of what’s to come.

Executive producers Zach Estrin and Michael Green says the new series is like Paranormal Activity to television and they want to scare viewers each week.

“This is a family show that will scare the crap out of you,” Estrin tells Blastr. “It tickles a certain part of your heart and your brain that you don’t normally get. And you certainly don’t get traditionally on television.”

The story follows the search on the Amazon River for a missing famed TV explorer, Emmet Cole (Bruce Greenwood) by Emmet’s wife, Tess (Leslie Hope), their adult son, Lincoln (Joe Anderson), and a film crew. The River also stars Paul Blackthorne and Eloise Mumford.

“People come out of the pilot with a lot of questions about what the show is going to be like, and we really strive to make it a nice, standalone horror movie every week with some overarching character mysteries,” said Estrin. “So each time that you tune in, you’ll get your own little beginning-middle-and-end horror movie and some questions to be answered next week.”

“Watching the pilot, you might think that it might be all mystery, all serialized, but we were excited to surprise people by not doing that and really just giving full stories every week,” said Green.

“We’ve talked about a lot of different things that are scary out there, and some of them are paranormal, some of them are human, some of them are ourselves, but there will always be something to scare us each and every week,” said Estrin.

While the series may kick off with the search for Dad, “we’re not going to be the show that for 80 episodes looks for the dad. Each season we’re going to wrap up our big story and ask a new question for the next season,” said Estrin.