Monsters of Television

“Every legend has a source, a place where it all began.”

“Sometimes bad things just happen.”

This post was inspired by the episodes “Bloody Mary,” “Skin,” “Hook Man,” and “Bugs” found on disc 2 of the first season DVD set.

So instead of doing a blow-by-blow of each episode on the second disc of Supernatural season 1, I’m going to do a sum-up post since my notes on each episode tended to be roughly the same due to the trends present in each of the episodes. I’ll try not to make a huge habit of doing this kind of a post since I think there’s some value in addressing each episode individually, or, at the most, paired, but I make no promises. (It’s also Christmas, so I figure one long entry may be a nice break from dealing with whatever you happen to be dealing with today, be it family or boredom or both!)

In any event, at this point in the season, I think I can address one of its big central premises: myths happening in every day life and most of us simply aren’t aware of it. More importantly though is that these myths aren’t occurring in big cities. Despite the claims of Toledo and St. Louis, we’re clearly in the suburbs of those cities, so how is it that the urban myth is now a suburban one?

From a production point of view, I understand the avoidance of urban area, even more so that the show is shot in Canada (Vancouver, yes?), where while many of that country’s cities stand in for the metropolitan U.S., sometimes it doesn’t feel all that convincing. Likewise there are probably only so many major cities you can shoot in until a production has to start really working to make them appear different: “The episode says they’re in Akron, but this looks an awful lot like Denver from three episodes ago.”

But these sorts of production practices end up influencing the style and the stories of a series, so they can’t be ignored when analyzing it. Which leads to the central question that this run of episodes raises: Why do these supernatural creatures and demons seem to not like major metropolitan areas? Why the suburbs and residential areas of these cities?

Generically, of course, horror doesn’t often take place in big cities. Even a film like REC, which takes place in Barcelona, contains itself to the apartment, creating a haunted house vibe, not a haunted city vibe. Horror likes isolation, it likes its victims being cut off somehow from the safety of the urban. Or in a film like Candyman, where the urban is one of the driving forces of the story, people remain isolated because of the highway that divides Cabrini-Green from the rest of Chicago.

All that said, the idea of the suburban being a site of supernatural activity actually makes a bit of sense if we stop and consider another of the supernatural’s trait: its in-betweenness, or what we academics like to call liminality. Horror thrives on liminality. Ghosts and zombies, after all, are in-between beings, existing in some space between living and dead. Likewise, demons and horrorifics tends to be someplace between human and non-human, recognizable and yet grotesque.

But think about in-between places, specifically think about how we characterize our living spaces. Urban-dwellers I know cannot tolerate the suburbs (even fewer understand how I can live in one). Rural-dwellers, on the other hand, seem to appreciate the suburbs for being nearby and not forcing them to travel further into the city for necessities, entertainment. In this regard, the suburbs exist in between being both too rural for the urban, but just urban enough for the rural. Likewise, the suburban exists as the threshold between the other two: going in one direction will lead you to the urban and the other to the rural.

When conceptualized this way, it makes sense that the supernatural would like the suburban. If we pile on depictions of the suburban as places where secrets are buried under a facade of perfection (e.g., “Arcadia” from The X-Files or the film Blue Velvet) as yet another reason the supernatural would be drawn to the suburban, then ideologically and geographically the suburban is a place where the supernatural can truly thrive and latch onto people.

So it’s no surprise, then, that three of the episodes on the disc (“Bloody Mary,” “Hook Man,” and “Bugs”) rely on these aspects for their monsters of the week. Secret murders motivate the Bloody Mary to jump from mirror to mirror (and who doesn’t love good mirror scares?) summoned by the talking to the mirror based on (sub)urban legend while the Hook Man attaches himself to the moral contempt of a reverend’s daughter.

“Bugs” plays in suburbia as well, though its premise is a bit more familiar as it’s essentially The Exorcist but with insects summoned by Native American curse as opposed to dead spirits crawling out of the television. The insects are a decidedly rural threat on the planned community, one that this liminal space doesn’t plan for it since it sees itself as just distanced enough from the rural to avoid any such threats.

The skinwalker remains the outlier. The episode is fairly urban in its setting, moving around St. Louis, and using the overly large sewers that we associate with cities to move around. But the sense of place doesn’t feel as strongly as in the other episodes, perhaps because we’re in the sewers so much, or that the main houses feel so interchangeable. In the other episodes, I’m able to say, “Suburb. College town. Planned community.” and those places feel defined to me. And perhaps here is another reason to avoid the city: it’s too impersonal, and maybe that’s why the skinwalker was able to get away with so much.

So as I go on with the series, I hope to see these tensions explored more between the senses of place, the supernatural, and how the brothers themselves cope. Which setting does each brother prefer? How does this play into their rebuild of the family unit?

FINAL THOUGHTS

• I realize that I probably conflated supernatural and horror together throughout this post. I don’t think they they are synonymous with one another by any means, and I apologize for the conflation. Perhaps something to better parse out in the comments?
• This show specializes in really attractive women getting into trouble, doesn’t it? Now when do Sam and Dean take off their clothes?  Where’s the BroYay? Is that in season 2?
• Where do they keep that printer they had in “Bloody Mary”? Their backseat never looks crowded and there’s clearly no room in the trunk. Along those same lines: What antiques place sells that many mirrors?
• I didn’t watch “Bugs” super closely because, well, ICK.
• Love that the show saves its budget for the really cool stuff, like watching Bloody Mary turn into goo, the Hook Man melt, or the squick-tastic skinwalker’s transformation. The bugs, however, meh.