#just wanted to save this article

[sensitivehandsomeactionman]

Inside ‘Supernatural’s’ Evolution From Monster-of-the-Week to Psychological Horror

by Danielle Turchiano | Oct 1, 2020 | Variety

A little boy sits alone on the floor of his bedroom. Backlit by a window, he leans over pages of construction paper on which he is obsessively drawing. A platoon of little green Army men guards the pages, and ultimately the boy. As the camera pans around him, he does not speak — in fact he has not spoken at all since his father drowned in a local lake the year before.

This is not the first time the audience, or even the main characters of “Supernatural” are introduced to this boy, as the moment comes a little less than half-way through the third episode of the series. But through the scene setup and shot style, it is the first time the audience gets a glimpse of the boy’s psyche, which will prove to be indispensable as the Winchester brothers work to solve the case of the mysterious lake deaths. It is also a turning point for a first-season show that would eventually run for 15 years.

“I watched Kim [Manners, director] set up this one shot and I thought, ‘That’s the way the show should be shot. This is the look we should be going for,'” executive producer Bob Singer tells Variety.

Creator Eric Kripke originally pitched “Supernatural” to studio Warner Bros. and eventually then-network the WB as a monster-movie-of-the-week drama about two brothers (Dean and Sam Winchester) who travel the backroads of America hunting the things the audience would remember from urban legends. But his main goal in his original pitch document was that “the weekly stories have to be SCARY AS S—.” (And yes, the all-caps was his emphasis.)

While he wanted to make “this series as scary as I can,” he wrote at the time, not all fear comes from an external source. Soon enough, it was the characters’ own trauma and internal struggles that were driving story and adding rich complications to an already well-known genre.

“We set out to make a horror show, and those were the initial stories we wrote. But you learn and adjust as you start watching the film, and a few things conspired to tell us, ‘We have to focus a lot more on the characters than we’re currently doing,’ which is we realized the actors we had,” Kripke tells Variety now. “We saw that they were just both wildly charismatic and emotional and were knocking everything we gave them out of the park. So we were like, ‘We should start giving them harder things to do because they can handle it.'”

The pilot introduced Dean (Jensen Ackles) and Sam’s (Jared Padalecki) trauma briefly, first by revealing that their mother died under mysterious circumstances in a house fire, resulting in their father devoting his life to hunting what killed her — even when it meant dragging his school-aged kids on the road and leaving them alone for days on end in rundown motels. When Sam’s girlfriend dies in a similar way in the present-day portion of the episode, a deeper, psychologically-scarring mythology is hinted at — but the focus of the first few episodes of the series is really more on the “task at hand” of taking out whatever creature is right in front of them — from a Woman in White in the pilot, to a wendigo in the second episode and a ghost in the third.

“When you get hired as staff on a first season show, you get handed the documents they used to sell the show, and that included some of the family secrets and what was going on with Sam. But it’s more like it was a headline that these children had been through a lot because of, we’ll call it, their unconventional life — and the details come when you start to have more space to tell the story,” says Sera Gamble, who penned “Dead in the Water,” the pivotal third episode of the first season with Raelle Tucker, and later went on to run the show in the sixth and seventh seasons.

When breaking the story for “Dead in the Water,” Gamble recalls a conversation with Kripke about how “most young children, especially who have been through something, [are] not just going to open up and give you all of the procedural information you need as an [exposition] dump in the scene.” In discussing how it needed to be harder to draw information out of that child, Gamble says she was inspired to “dig deeper into the psychology of the characters in that script,” which became a baseline for episodes going forward.

“Now I can’t imagine approaching anything with a fantasy element without starting from that place,” she says. “These stories were scary to us because they feel like they tap into something true. Your road as a writer to something that’s going to terrify the audience is through human psychology.”

What each audience member finds scary can vary — and often comes from factors outside a show’s control, from the person’s own upbringing and experiences to the kinds of other stories they consume. In order to to make sure to deliver unique horror elements in each episode, Singer says that from the beginning, “one thing we always said was that the shooting style should be commensurate with what the monster was or what the tone was, so we didn’t feel like we were doing a cookie-cutter horror [show].”

The characters within each of those episodes also had to be unique, even if the type of creature the Winchesters were fighting was something they’d encountered before. “Halfway through Season 1, the first run of the scripts, we realized we were going to run out of monsters in a hurry,” if we didn’t, Singer says. “So if we did a vampire story, each version would not be what you’ve seen before — each version had their own story.”

Often these characters had traumatic backstories of their own, such as Gordon (Sterling K. Brown), a hunter who was on a one-track mission to eradicate the supernatural from Earth after his sister was taken by a vampire when he was just a teenager. (In the most heart-wrenching twist, he later was turned into the thing he hated the most.) Sometimes they even brought out complicated issues for the main characters, such as when Sam fell for Madison (Emmanuelle Vaugier), a werewolf who he was going to have to kill, reigniting the fears he had about losing the women he loved.

And as time went on, those issues and fears began to pile up and often go unresolved. Dean never truly mourned his mother and Sam didn’t fully get to grieve his college girlfriend Jess (Adrianne Palicki) and both had complex feelings about their father and the way they were raised. But then Dean traded his life to save Sam’s, sending the older Winchester to Hell (literally), while the younger one had to carry on alone. Being the true vessels for Michael and Lucifer could have pitted the brothers against each other but ultimately this time it was Sam who went into the pit to Hell, leaving Dean to move on. Sam also lost his soul, got addicted to demon blood and never quite could shake his PTSD from his time with Lucifer (Mark Pellegrino); Dean ended up with PTSD after getting back from war-like Purgatory. Both brothers struggled with wanting to believe in Team Free Will, even when learning they are literally God’s (Rob Benedict) favorite television show and their lives have been manipulated for it. And of course along the way they’ve lost countless other friends and loved ones, from surrogate uncle Bobby (Jim Beaver) to Charlie (Felicia Day) and even their mother (Samantha Smith) again after she was brought back from the dead, only to eventually be killed by Lucifer’s son Jack (Alex Calvert).

“Sam and Dean both went through a ton of trauma. Sam probably had more reminders of his trauma because, obviously Pellegrino remained as Lucifer for many, many years, and Sam had to be facing his No. 1 offender in causing his PTSD,” says Padalecki. “The writers, obviously, always were aware that Sam had been through what he’d been through with Lucifer so they peppered that in [but they] allowed me to take it further if I needed to.”

While Kripke acknowledges that the broadcast format — especially back in 2005 — lent itself well to a slow burn on mythology in the beginning, he also believes characters are more interesting if you “peel back those layers one at a time” as the show goes on. But there is also a more pragmatic reason behind easing the audience into the more psychological horror of “Supernatural” according to Dr. Lynn S. Zubernis, a licensed clinical psychologist, professor and author of several “Supernatural” books, including this year’s “There’ll Be Peace When You Are Done: Actors and Fans Celebrate the Legacy of Supernatural.”

She explains: “One of the reasons that we as humans have so much trouble processing trauma is that we literally store those trauma memories in a different way to store our regular memories and then we can’t get to them and they just end up split off and unprocessed and we don’t want to go there. So we have a lot of defenses against looking at our own trauma. That’s why projecting onto fictional characters is such a great way to do it. But if it came at us all at once, our brains would be like, ‘No, no, no no; we’re not going there.’ You have to go slow in the beginning and then be hooked in and trust the storytelling, in a way, before it goes that deep.”

The same was true for the actors. “Early on, we maybe had to use some techniques or some tricks of the trade to get to a certain point emotionally, but as time went on and the seasons went on, we didn’t have to use those tricks,” says Ackles. “Living with this story — not just living with the characters but living with this story — when things happen, we’re able to really feel it from a character’s perspective because we have lived with it so long and we understand their hurt and their pain and their laughter and their joy.”

Adds Padalecki: “We lost so many characters, I feel like we had a lot of chances to deal with what Sam and Dean would go through with the loss of a character or friend, and so, after the 30th time, it was like, ‘OK I remember what Sam goes through; I remember how he feels; I remember how to be and where I want to be in the storyline as a whole.’ If God forbid there came a situation where they were like, ‘Hey we need to shoot this scene tonight, it’s two pages, it’s you and Dean and Lucifer, then I could have done it — and Mark and Jensen could have done it as well.'”

As the show evolved, the type of horror it delivered week after week would consist different ratios of a combination of jump scares and more of a “disturbing fear that doesn’t leave you — the kind of fear that gives me chills, instead of making me want to scream,” as Zubernis puts it.

“I remember getting a note from Eric that changed the way I wrote the show and kind of cracked the show open for me,” Gamble says. “It was [for] an episode where a demon in the body of a woman has, I want to say, Bobby tied up and they are snarky back and forth but he is her prisoner. And what Eric said was, ‘You’re writing these lines where the demon is very witty and funny and smart, but the thing that is so terrifying about a demon, even as you are entertained by it is that they can see straight into your soul.’ So this thing that they will say to you will be the thing that hurts the most. And so, that was the guiding principle for writing the bad guys: They had to be incredibly insightful to find these guys’ Achilles heels.

“It was also the guiding principle in writing Dean, who was very much going to say the funniest lines in episodes, but he’s never trying to crack you up — he’s actually speaking from a deep well of pain and his way of processing that is to say something hilarious like he’s tough and it doesn’t matter,” Gamble continues.

“We knew the guys had deep trauma and deep pain and were frequently struggling quietly with something, and we always held the monster peril or the danger to a high standard of, ‘We’re not going to make this a joke. This is going to really be life or death.’ So if you have those pieces of the puzzle where the life or death stakes are there, the emotional truth is there, and then you have characters who crack a joke in the face of death, then you can go a lot of places tonally.”

This included expanding the world out to get inside the heads of other core characters — from Castiel’s (Misha Collins) own struggle with how he allowed power to corrupt him, to Jack’s guilt over killing Mary, to diving into memories of Bobby losing his wife and Jody Mills (Kim Rhodes) losing her own family. In some cases, it meant quite literally spending the majority of episodes inside characters’ heads, as well — from Season 2’s “What Is and What Should Never Be,” in which Dean’s psyche is in an “apple pie” alternate reality while he is losing his life to a djnn, to Season 4’s “The Rapture” when Sam is detoxing from demon blood, to Season 7’s “Death’s Door,” which sees a dying Bobby trying to outrun his reaper.

In the latter episode, Gamble reminds, the show was “exploring his core wounds by seeing the memories that are the most important to him.”

“We observed from just watching so many shows in this genre that the Big Bad gets bigger and bigger every season and the war gets more massive and pretty soon you’re a tiny little Lego guy and you’re literally facing God,” she explains. “So part of our job from very early on was to slow down or to avoid running into plot that was so massive that you’re just little specs in a giant galaxy. The way to approach that is always to come from what is personal inside of the story to the boys.”

After all, at the core of the show was always the Winchesters — whether the danger they were in was because of a literal demon in front of them or an internal demon they had yet to conquer.

“If you put them in real jeopardy — believable jeopardy for our world — then the scares will take care of themselves,” Singer says.

(Pictured: Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki in “Supernatural,” which returns with its final seven episodes beginning Oct. 8 on the CW)

[mementomoriwithacherryontop]

This article about Dead Boy Detectives and Netflix's stewardship of LGBTQ+ shows is my Roman Empire

I'm linking the article below, and it's one of the best analysis' out there about both the significance of Dead Boy Detectives' being cancelled, but also the bigger picture of why this is so significant to both fans and the LGBTQ+ community at large. Please read (and share!) the article, Why we need more queer art, not less-the case of Dead Boy Detectives, written by Karla Elliott.

A damning excerpt, and article linked below:

"Netflix has long tried to market itself to audiences just like this as an alternative to more traditional media companies. Yet its cancellation of Dead Boy Detectives is another in a long line of queer shows and shows with queer storylines – such as Sense8, Julie and the Phantoms, and Shadow and Bone – to be axed by the company before their time.

The showrunner of Warrior Nun, another of Netflix’s prematurely cancelled shows, even revealed that Netflix pushed back against the writers developing a queer romance for the show’s second season.

Meanwhile, the streaming service continues to platform performers such as Dave Chappelle, who used his latest Netflix special (his seventh on the streaming service) to double down on jokes made about the queer community, particularly targeting transgender folk.

It seems, then, that companies such as Netflix are still largely only interested in token queer representation, and only if and when it aligns with ever-shifting profit goalposts."

She goes on to talk about the crew and fans rallying around Dead Boy Detectives and taking a grassroots approach to save this show. She links IG and Twitter posts (it'll always be Twitter, to me), and she includes The Petition in her article.

She also accurately addresses the NG elephant in the room, pointing to his limited involvement in the show and how Dead Boy Detective fans have "resolutely condemned his alleged actions and stood with the women speaking out against him. Their outrage perfectly aligns with the core lessons of the show, which counters harmful gendered stereotypes and advocates for men to take responsibility for their actions, hold one another accountable, process anger, and open up to feelings like love and empathy."

She concludes, and I must admit, this brought a tear to my jaded 'lil heart, that "[t]hrough its community-building, energy, and activism, the fanbase is proving to be the living embodiment of the lessons Dead Boy Detectives has to teach us about solidarity, love and care."

So, go us. Keep at it. Don't loose hope. And please check out this article. I gave you a sneak peak, but it's chalk full of really good information and I promise you'll be glad you read it.

[bikefuckersoftheworldunite]

okay!!

[icewindandboringhorror]

sometimes looking at like Self Help Strategies lists for the symptoms I'm having is always just like:

thing that I already do

thing I have tried 10 times

thing I already do

thing that I don't have the money to do

thing I already do

thing I've been doing since I was 10yrs old to no avail

thing that is impossible given my situation

thing that doesn't apply to me

thing that I already do

thing I have already tried

hrmm, oh wait, maybe finally- OH, yeah.. okay. thing that I already do but it was just phrased slightly differently

thing I have already done

[micewithknives]

I am sliding into your inbox to ask you about historically multicultural australia 👀 what’s one fact/event/etc no one’s asked about yet that you think makes a good story?

I have a million and one ideas for things that no one has asked about that i think are terribly underrated. But I'll roll with a definitely not unknown, but definitely brushed over, simple answer of the topic of "afghan cameleers" in Australia.

While theyre often called "Afghan" in Australian history, they actually came from a variety of countries throughout the Middle East and south Asia. They were predomanently Muslim men, some bringing their families, although other religious minorities did also exist.

The Cameleers, (and their camels) were first brought over to Australia in 1838, although in no form of high numbers until 1858 when they were involved in the Bourke and Wills exploration of the east coast states. As a British colony, there were various high level people in Australia who were aware (from interactions with India and the Middle East primarily) of the benefits of camels in dealing with desert climates.

For over 50 years, camel trains became the primary form of transporting pastoral goods across much of the rural parts of Australia, at the hands of very experienced Cameleers. As a result of this, there was historically a number of towns which became known as "little Asia"s, "little Afghanistan"s or "Ghantowns".

Many of these men are coming to be recognised in modern times as fundamental actors in Australia's modern history. They also married Aboriginal, Chinese, or European women, and often, despite racial and cultural descrimination, became well respected members of local towns, playing important roles in their developments. Many of the men continued to travel back and forth from their home-countries, conducting business on an international scale. At the peak of employment, it is believed that 2000-4000 cameleers were employed in Australia, however recording of this immigration at this time is limited, and it is possible the numbers may have been higher.

However, when Australia introduced the Immigration Restriction Act 1901 (otherwise known as the "White Australia Policy"), many of these men found they were unable to become naturalised citizens of the newly-federated country, and thus unable to return to the communities (and families) that had become their homes. The remaining "afghan" communities dwindled after this. With the increase of railway access to Australia, the need for skilled cameleers died out, and the once valued workers became subject to a lack of employment, and increasing government and community persecution. Much of the men that remained into this time chose to return to their home-countries.

However, some communities remained. The town of Marree in South Australia is the location of the first Mosque in Australia, and is recognised as the longest surviving "Ghan-town" community, and the location of many descendant families. These workers, and their descendants, are also responsible for the construction of Australia's oldest permanent mosque, the Central Adelaide Mosque.

In recent times Australia is beginning to acknowledge important role these men made in the country's modern history, although they are subject to limited discussion, research, and archaeological recognition. And there is still a way to go, especially in making sure that the surviving archaeological sites relating to these communities and workers aren't lost.

[yousaytomato]

Ariadne Abandoned by Theseus (1774, Oil on canvas) - By Angelica Kauffmann (1741–1807)

[iknowwhereyousleepatnight]

oughhhh five million articles with tiny fonts but it's a pdf so i cant increase the text size without zooming in and having to manually scroll side to side to read everything or just suffer with the small font because i can only use half my screen for reading because the other half of my screen for writing in my word doc my DETESTED

[transsexualunderground]

Hi this article means everything to me forever and always so I have to post it here

[atopvisenyashill]

i feel the same way about Sansa as I do Brienne which is that if a sad teenager’s question of “will anyone ever love me for who i am” is answered with “lol nah” I personally don’t find that to be a very fulfilling story

[scoringeffects]

.

[frogwithastrawberry]

There's another fear-mongering headline on Google!

I read several studies on the "intermittent fasting causes heart disease" headline, and let me clarify something that I learned from it:

The fasting itself is not entirely what causes the heart problems. The heart problems come from a lack of nutrients, and then a quick override of non-nutritious things.

So especially bringing this up for Ramadan: You can still fast safely. Just look at what you're eating when you break your fast. If you've been fasting for 12-16 hours- as tempting as it may be- don't gravitate first toward junk food. You don't have to avoid it entirely, but eat your meat, vegetables, fruit and such first.

TLDR: The headline is misleading. The act of fasting isn't what causes health problems, it's what you eat in the break between the fast. Prioritize foods that make you feel satisfied but are still healthy, and then enjoy a snack if you feel like you can

[theskyexists]

I dont think people can understand that anyone can anyone I know that i have lived in a mostly disassociated state for now one and a half years and this will likely continue for the rest of my life

[unproduciblesmackdown]

thinking of how like reading albert cashier's (19th century trans man, fought in the union army) wikipedia article is devastating to me, in a good way, when like there's no The Diary Of, The Posthumously Discovered Letters Of Albert Cashier, it's all like fairly dry Facts about someone living a fairly ordinary life mostly Known by us all later via like, here's his stints at various jobs....and it's that like it's this life where several times due to injury / illness, his being trans was Known to any other people, and those people who, as is always the case in any matters of how we treat others, didn't Have to be respectful & simply mind their own business, but they did anyways, no known added factors, they Just Did. noting that despite hospitalization in the union army stint, he evaded detection(tm), but that it's then later on like this ordinary guy with an ordinary job, albert gets sick & a family he had meals with (a) takes care of him thus (b) becoming aware he's trans, and they: mind their own business about it. later, different job, totally different & even more removed party in the physician involved who realizes this person is trans, Also just minds their own business like aaugh!! the tragic downturn that when becoming "too" disabled for a Soldiers & Sailors Home (where friends & soldiers from his union army regiment visited, it says!! this with notes prior about like "other soldiers in the regiment noted he tended to keep to himself but he's not the only one in the world doing so huh" like waaah!!) being institutionalized & like of course in that environment that's where we get the violence of ppl learning someone's trans & this disabled person being forced into clothes they obviously even now would not choose for themself, or they'd already be wearing them!! but that then what Also happens is that even being this Extra vulnerable now and being trans being Known such that his military pension was investigated for fraud, Former Comrades vouched that this is the same person who fought with them, it was decided the pension payments should continue for life, they did, he was buried as albert cashier with full military honors i'm sooo ;;;m;;; like Cry Every Time (crying now. help) when it's just So like, people, as they do, don't Have to treat anyone decently, and obviously trans people are vulnerable & you're of course made to believe there weren't even 19th century trans people & everyone would Of Course summarily reject it if so b/c the internet wasn't around to mess things up, so that's an extra layer, but truly that timelessness anyways like. this person w/his identity so Lifelong that no "birth name" was known until someone handling his estate traced it back years later, this guy just out here, living his life, with nothing asserted to make him so "exceptional" as to "justify" Exceptions(tm) Made, with nothing about otherwise leveraged power or advantages or appeals....just various assorted people in his life all choosing to be respectful, even when they didn't Have to, just people coming through and Recognizing This Person. thus i sure do cry every time

[misskamelie]

What do you know, I may be able to finish this project in a timely manner

[janamensch]

Spidersonas for my beloved OCs June and Keenan!

[izanori]

dude does anybody have any adhd hacks that make you become able do things that are boring or require effort (i do not have the money or connections to buy drugs)