The first kind of story re-conceives a supernatural creature as a natural one: the monster isn’t from the pit of Hell, or animated by an amalgam of magic and science; he’s just a human being who’s been infected by a virus, not really “supernatural” at all. A scientific monstrosity, not a supernatural one. Think of the undead creatures from 28 Days Later or the recent film version of Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend. Or consider Ridley Scott’s Alien. These stories locate a horror story inside the natural world as we understand it; they work without any intervention from the outside. Unforeseen events give rise to something that looks supernatural, but really isn’t. This kind of story eliminates the supernatural piece by piece, showing how what looked like magic or mystery can be explained in scientific terms. Although this kind of horror has been flourishing fairly recently, thereby earning the title of a recent trend, it’s not really a new phenomenon. In fact, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) is perhaps the quintessential scientific horror tale. And, more generally, a lot of science fiction stories can be classified as belonging to the horror genre, too. It’s no surprise that a modernist sensibility would favor reducing the magical to the scientific, the inexplicable to the explicable. But this isn’t how Supernatural rolls at all; our show isn’t into reductionism.
The second kind of story involves expanding or altering our conception of nature. Such horror stories have a lot in common with fantasy, because they take up the project of building another world, an alternate reality. They’re extended exercises in wondering “What if?” In such a story, vampires are magical creatures, perhaps, but then the world of the narrative is a magical world! Consider two of be best known instances of this kind of story: Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake series and Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse books. In these popular story arcs, vampires and werewolves are just part of American society. They have jobs and they have to pay the rent. They even have their own bars and nightclubs to frequent. Laws have to be written to handle their special circumstances, maybe even some anti-discrimination legislation. And, of course, they’re potential dates for whoever is our current protagonist. Here, too, the presence of a monster requires no incursion from the outside-there need be nothing supernatural in that sense. It’s just that the inside of these storied worlds is a lot bigger than the inside of our world (and, as we’ve seen, that creates an ambiguity in what it means for something to be supernatural). Joss Whedon’s endearing and enduring Buffyverse is one of the earliest and most formative examples of this kind of story in television. Buffy goes to class, chats with her friends, and stakes a vampire in the cemetery. As I’ve characterized it in this essay, “the Winchesterverse” is this same kind of place, although sadly it makes for a much less graceful moniker.
This second kind of horror story may in some ways not be a horror story at all. Or maybe what makes it horror isn’t necessarily what one might think. Remember that horror is the intrusion of the unfamiliar into the familiar. If a vampire is depicted as familiar in a story, as part of the story’s backdrop, then it isn’t going to be a source of horror. A related point is that a story’s genre isn’t merely a matter of its setting. Even though a story has vampires in it, it might be more a romance or a detective novel than a horror novel. It might make you laugh or work hard at solving a mystery without arousing any dread whatsoever. So what is horror and what isn’t? Must horror be about the supernatural? Is Supernatural horror? Once we discern the ambiguity in the concepts of horror and the supernatural and the ways in which these two concepts can come apart, it becomes really hard to identify horror’s boundaries. Yet some boundaries simply are fuzzy, and it’s a mistake to try to make something clear when it’s not. In the end, arriving at a decisive conclusion that something does or doesn’t count as horror is only important to the people who have to decide where to shelve books or DVDs. Those of us who want to think about stories do better if we have a conversation, even a debate, about how and in what ways something does or doesn’t look and feel like horror.
As a television show with an ongoing but serialized storyline, Supernatural has the opportunity to blend genres. (Thankfully, we haven’t had to endure a musical theatre episode.) Overall, the show is a mix of classic and new horror. Sometimes, we’re asked to see through the eyes of the uninitiated, for whom the world is empty of monsters. A guy picks up a sexy hitchhiker in a white dress and we’re with him when she disappears and reappears. That can’t happen! Other times we’re inside Sam and Dean’s perspective and the creatures are expected. They’re dangerous, of course, but not uncanny. We may feel fear and tension, as we would while watching people we care about putting themselves at risk, but we don’t feel dread. Still other times even our two heroes face something they just don’t understand, something they’d rather look away from. A new monster they don’t yet understand, perhaps. Or an angel. From story to story, the border between the familiar and the unfamiliar shifts, and the locus of horror shifts with it. Often, even though Sam and Dean spend most of their time hunting monsters that would frighten us out of our wits, the things that really fill them with horror and dread aren’t so different from what horrifies us. They grapple with the questions of whether there’s something that transcends human experience, whether the universe is ultimately friendly or hostile, and whether life is meaningful or empty. And what really frightens each of them is the doom looming over the other. Supernatural’s horror is most effective when its source is the love of two brothers. Dean can face off with any hellish creature you like, but he can’t face a world without Sammy or a world where Sam has become the thing they fight. Likewise, Sam is most haunted by Dean’s recurring death in “Mystery Spot” (3-11) and by Dean’s all too rapidly approaching damnation. This dread of the death and destruction of those we love is all too tragically familiar and its invocation is what makes Supernatural most moving, most frightening, and most horrifying.
RANDALL M. JENSEN is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern College in Orange City, Iowa. He has contributed chapters to several books on philosophy and popular culture, including most recently Batman and Philosophy and Battlestar Galactica and Philosophy. Given his longstanding fascination with horror, fantasy, science fiction, comics, and so on, he’s delighted that he has finally found a way to make it part of his day job.
Humans like to be frightened. At least, we like to be frightened from the safety of our living room or the comfort of our couch. Be it in slasher flicks or fairy tales or TV shows like Supernatural, we prove time and again that we enjoy having the pants scared off of us. Why? What is it about a show like Supernatural that is so compelling? Is it the scare that keeps us coming back for more? Or, as Dr. Gregory Stevenson suggests, do the supernatural trials and tribulations of the Winchesters appeal because they merely hold a mirror to the more mundane terrors we all face every day?
GREGORY STEVENSON
HORROR, HUMANITY, AND THE DEMON IN THE MIRROR
One night I was putting my then four-year-old daughter Alexandra to bed. As I was tucking her in, she looked up at me with the kind of sweet, innocent eyes that belong to four-year-old girls and said, “Daddy, tell me a scary story.” There is something deeply ingrained within us that seeks out the frightening amidst the comfortable, the bizarre amidst the normal, and the supernatural amidst the natural. Is that not why children love fairy tales? I’m not talking about the sanitized fairy tales we force-feed children today in which the three little pigs reconcile their differences with the big bad wolf. I’m talking about the original fairy tales in the Brothers Grimm tradition-fairy tales in which people’s eyes get poked out, grandmothers get eaten by wolves, and fee-fi-fo-fumming giants meet a grisly end. Real fairy tales are dark stories that tap into that part of us that finds a strange form of comfort in the encounter with things that frighten us. What could be scarier than to be lost in a strange wood only to come upon a kindly old lady in a candy house? The promise of sweets quickly turns sour as you find yourself locked in a cage and staring at an oven, kno
wing that it’s not a Honey Baked Ham the old lady is planning to slide in there. My mother read that story to me as a child. It was terrifying … and I loved it!
That’s the reason I began to watch Supernatural. I wanted to hear a scary story. When I speak of scary stories, I am not particularly interested in the kind of horror shows that try to shock the audience through gross-out displays of blood and gore or by having monsters jump out from unexpected places at unexpected moments. No, the kind of scary stories I’m talking about are the kind that make the hair stand up on your forearms-those creepy kinds of tales that generate bone-tingling shivers and spark the kinds of irrational thoughts (“I think there is a monster in my closet”) that make you afraid to get up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. Those are the tales that Supernatural tells.
Yet a strange thing happened to me over the course of this show’s first three seasons. The episodes no longer scare me as they once did. As I look back, I recall the episodes of season one being scarier than those of season two, and the episodes of season two being scarier than those of season three. Has the show lost its touch? Have the writers gone soft? I don’t think so. I think I’ve simply become conditioned to the show, desensitized if you will, like the time I listened to Pearl Jam’s version of “Last Kiss” so many times that it eventually stopped having the same jolting impact. So one might expect that I have become bored with Supernatural. Not at all. If anything, I’ve enjoyed the third season most of all. This is a curious thing. If the show no longer scares me to the degree it once did, then why do I keep watching? Why do any of this show’s viewers keep coming back week after week? Is it simply the promise of cheap thrills or the presence of two hot guys (I exclude myself from this motivation)? Or is it something deeper? As with the little old lady in the gingerbread house, might our fascination with scary stories involve more than meets the eye?
MONSTERS AND METAPHORS
The best horror stories are about much more than making one’s date cling a little tighter. They are like a funhouse mirror held up to our darkest fears and deepest insecurities. They take those fears and reshape them into something monstrous. Renowned psychologist Bruno Bettleheim suggested that children need fairy tales for this very reason. In fairy tales, the abstract and intangible fears that children have difficulty wrapping their minds around (like the fear of abandonment) become embodied as witches and wolves that can be fought against and vanquished.2 The monsters, in other words, are metaphors for what truly frightens them. Adults have fears too and these fears are often much darker and more real than the terrors that children face. This is why some of our most noted writers of fairy tales, J. R. R. Tolkien (The Lord of the Rings) and C. S. Lewis (The Chronicles of Narnia), have said that fairy tales function best for adults.34 In the horror stories we tell each other, the monsters often represent adult fears. Frankenstein’s monster represents the horror of science run amok without ethical guidelines. Jekyll and Hyde remind us of the potential for both good and evil within each human being. The Wolfman represents the constant struggle against our own animalistic urges. Count Dracula serves as a metaphor for the powerful elite who feed off the poor and vulnerable. Vampires boast a long tradition of standing in for our social ills and anxieties, whether plague, racism, or the AIDS virus. With the rapid rise of the technological age, we become anxious about the potential impact of computers on our society and fear that they might one day prove to be our downfall. So, when the machine in The Terminator is finally stripped of its human façade and pursues Sarah Connor as a monstrous mixture of metal and computer chips, with fire-red eyes radiating artificial intelligence, we never look at our PCs the same way again.
Why are we drawn to such horror stories? We should not discount the adrenaline rush of a good fright or the numerous benefits of having one’s date grab on more tightly, but perhaps it’s something deeper that keeps us coming back time and again. Perhaps we keep watching because we see ourselves and our own struggles reflected back to us. When the monsters are defeated, we cheer-not just because the bad guy has fallen, but because we witness the defeat of our own anxieties. Ultimately, horror stories are less about the world outside us than they are the world inside us.
IS SUPERNATURAL ATHEISTIC?
At Christmas time one year, a young Dean Winchester informed his little brother Sam that monsters were real, but Santa wasn’t (“A Very Supernatural Christmas,” 3-8). In other words, evil’s afoot, but goodness is a little harder to find. For a show called Supernatural, this show has a rather one-sided view of the supernatural. Demons and other dark entities abound, yet benevolent supernatural beings are scarce. Some would suggest that, by definition, evil requires the existence of good; that if Hell exists, so must Heaven. Yet in Supernatural’s world, there are no angels, no assertions of God’s existence, no Santa, not even a harmless Easter bunny. There are pagan “gods,” but essentially they function as little more than amped-up demons. One might think that a Supernatural Christmas episode would bring a little good cheer. Instead, the episode revolved around an evil Santa-like figure who turned out to be a pair of cannibalistic pagan gods. At least in keeping with the holiday spirit, these gods were impaled by a Christmas tree branch (“A Very Supernatural Christmas”).
Why call a show Supernatural and then exclude half of the supernatural realm? The mundane answer might be because benevolent supernatural beings aren’t nearly as frightening. (I say this despite the fact that the thought of an old guy wearing bright red clothing with bells on it and sneaking into my house in the middle of the night to eat my milk and cookies is a tad creepy.) There is, however, a deeper answer. To have God or angels make an appearance would make the story more about the cosmic war between good and evil than the human war between the good and evil impulses within ourselves.
By keeping God in the shadows, Supernatural shifts the focus to the human struggle. In fact, God is not the only one absent on Supernatural. Satan has also left the building. Dean, who despite his experience with all kinds of demonic entities remained doubtful about the existence of God, was similarly quite surprised to learn that many demons believe the devil is real. A demon informed him that many demons are true believers in a higher (lower?) power they call Lucifer. Though no demon has ever seen Lucifer, they believe in him, that he made them, and that one day he will return for them. As the demon said, “I’ve got faith. So you see, is my kind really all that different from yours?” (“Sin City,” 3-4). The answer, though, is yes. What distinguishes their faith is its object. The demons trust in the power of evil; Sam and Dean trust in the potential of humanity for goodness.
Although God does not show up in the credits at the end of any episode, the idea of God is a recurring character on this show. The concept of God’s will and who precisely is carrying out that will is a common theme. Several characters on the show, from the prostitute who murdered a churchgoer to the preacher’s wife who summoned a reaper against her enemies to the demon hunters who tried to kill Sam, believed that they were called to do God’s will, prompting Dean to counter: “God save us from half the people who think they’re doing God’s work” (“Faith,” 1-12). The irony is that Sam and Dean may be the people doing God’s work. In the episode “Faith,” Layla suggested to Dean, “Maybe God works in mysterious ways.” When the faith healer Roy then selected Dean out of the crowd and healed him, Roy said it was due to what he saw in Dean’s heart: “A young man with an important purpose. A job to do. And it isn’t finished.” In another episode, a man told a priest just before committing suicide in the church, “Father, God’s not with us. Not anymore… . He can’t help us. And if he can, he won’t” (“Sin City”). Of course, Sam and Dean then rode into town and defeated the demonic presence there. Perhaps God helped out after all.
If God is not completely absent on Supernatural, neither are His presence or will obvious. Much like in real life. And Supernatural is very much about real life. By keeping both God and Satan at a distance, potentially there but always in the bac
kground, Supernatural becomes a show about how human beings conduct themselves in the shadows of good and evil.
THE DEMON IN THE MIRROR
If monsters are metaphors in the best horror traditions, then what do the monsters on Supernatural represent? In one third season episode, Ruby, a somewhat repentant demon, informed Dean that all demons were once human. What Hell does, she helpfully related, is burn away all traces of humanity from a person (“Malleus Maleficarum,” 3-9). The demon is what’s left. Thus, in the world as imagined by Supernatural, the demons are metaphors of the human potential for evil. In fact, they represent the fulfillment of that potential. Whereas the first two seasons of Supernatural had Sam and Dean fighting battles against a variety of supernatural foes, the third season shifted gears into an all-out war between the Winchester brothers and the demonic forces. What made this so engaging to watch was the nagging sense that the battle depicted on the screen was just as much about the battle raging within ourselves-the constant tug-of-war between good and evil.
Consider the episode “Sin City,” in which a Rockwellian small town in Ohio was transformed into a den of iniquity. Sam and Dean, of course, attributed this to demonic presence in the town. There were demons there, all right, but demons weren’t the problem. When confronted, a rather attractive demon confessed that all she did was point people in the right direction. She had lunch with a mover and shaker named Trotter and simply hinted about some businesses through which profit could be made by catering to vice. The result? As she put it, “Supposedly God-fearing folk waist-deep in booze, sex, gambling. I barely lifted a finger… . All you gotta do is nudge humans in the right direction … and they’ll walk right into Hell with big fat smiles on their faces.” The human potential for evil and sin is unlimited and the evidence is abundant. The comely demon noted, “War, genocide. It’s only getting worse. I mean, this past century you people racked up a body count that amazed even us.” That potential for evil, she claimed, was why the demons would win the war, or in other words, why the darker side of our human nature often triumphs. The line between demon and human was awfully blurred in this episode, so much so that when Dean attempted to defend humanity by asserting that demons are evil, it rang a little hollow. So even though Sam and Dean defeated the demons in this town, they belatedly realized that the human businessman Trotter was still alive and well and thus wondered whether they had accomplished anything at all.
In the Hunt: Unauthorized Essays on Supernatural Page 6