Hell House is a brilliant, standalone episode of Supernatural, putting a unique spin on the classic 'haunted house' trope.
A group of teenagers investigate a famous haunted shack outside their small Texas town one evening, having heard stories of a violent spook that strings up young girls in the basement. The house is full of strange symbols and animal parts tacked to the walls and down in the fruit cellar they stumble across... a girl's corpse hanging from the rafters.
By the time the police get there the corpse is gone and the incident is dismissed as a hoax.
Sometime later, having read about the incident on the Internet, the Winchester brothers begin to investigate the story, but as they look into it they soon discover - as with many urban legends - that the facts don't fit the recognised story.
Only then, a girl is really found dead in the cellar of the 'Hell House' and the Winchester's investigations are complicated by the arrival of two local 'professional' ghost hunters - the owners of the website the story was first found on, Hellhound's Lair (and yes, it is a real website... well, a real Supernatural viral marketing website anyway).
The geeks, whose names are plays on characters in Ghostbusters (Egon Spengler and Winston Zeddemore), Harry Spangler (Travis Wester) and Ed Zeddmore (A.J. Buckley) dismiss the Winchester's as "amateur thrill seekers".
Although there are some tense, creepy moments in this episode, it's also played heavily for laughs with the interaction between the Winchesters and the Hellhound boys, as well as Sam and Dean's own escalating 'prank war'.
It turns out that the creature haunting the shack is actually a tulpa, a thought-form creature accidently called into being and then given power by people's belief in its existence - and it is being fuelled by the stories on the website being focused so prominently on the old house.
The Hellbound boys - whose motto is "What Would Buffy Do?" - make great, light-hearted antagonists for the Winchester brothers and, given the subliminal advert for the Margaret Weis Supernatural role-playing game towards the end of the episode, it seems only fitting that I suggest roleplaying gamesmasters look to this episode for the idea of off-kilter foils to complicate their player characters' lives.
And they couldn't go far wrong by setting the PCs up against a tulpa - a creature who can possess whatever powers people believe it has!
Monday, 15 September 2008
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I watched this last night and laughed a lot. Much of the laughter was with the show, but some of it, for a change, was *at* the show. You see, the "small Texas town" where it's set, Richardson, is where I actually live.
ReplyDeleteI'm sure that the show has lots of geographical inaccuracies that I just don't notice or care about much of the time. But of course, they shone very, very clearly here. It's no big deal, really. It was a good, fun story, and the show doesn't pretend to be a travel log. But I did get jolted out of the story pretty often when things just didn't match up with what I know about the area.
A few quick hits:
* Richardson was portrayed as pretty rural. It's basically a suburb of Dallas. Not much rural here at all. Very generic USA. You don't have to go far to find places that are a little more stereotypically Texan, like what you see in the episode, but you do have to go farther than this.
* Points to the show for recognizing that Richardson is in Collin County and using that name for the library, but of course it looks nothing like the actual Richardson Library that I visit about once a week.
* The hell house itself, and the wilderness around it, just didn't look like anything you'd see around here.
* I have yet to see any homes in North Texas with basements (like the one that played such a large role in the episode). You can actually do a Google search for "Why are there no basements in Texas" that will answer some of the reasons why, but a lot of it has to do with the soil.
Anyway, I feel like a nitpicker, but I did enjoy the episode overall. It's a good reminder, though, that when you just wing it with anything having to do with the real world, *somebody* is going to notice it. In this case, where the show goes to a different site every episode, there's probably no value in doing the research necessary to avoid these kinds of mistakes.
Oops! ;)
ReplyDeleteAs you say this probably happens all the time.
I remember back in the '80s there was a DC comic (during one of its big 'events') where one of the characters came from Tunbridge Wells (my home town) and what we saw of it in the comic bore no resemblance to reality either!