When Hope is your worst enemy

[affablyevil]

Dean: It's all yours. All you gotta do is bring Sam back. Give me ten years. Ten years, then you come for me.

Crossroads Demon: You must be joking. We're on an apocalyptic time schedule here! Bip bip bip!

- All Hell Breaks Loose Part 2, paraphrased

Lauren Davis over at io9 wrote an interesting article called Why Great Horror is Heartbreaking, which, while it didn't mention Supernatural, definitely threw the show's overall genre concerns in relief. You know, if you mix in some humanistic issues (fate versus free will) and Constantine.

There are reasons why stories like "The Monkey's Paw" endure, and why its ideas find its way into so many other works of horror. They force us to access our fears of losing those closest to us, asking us how far we would go to keep them with us. Perhaps the most frightening thing about these stories that many of us will face terrible grief in our lives — and perhaps even guilt at the deaths of our loved ones — and we could be capable of making the same terrible decisions as the people in these stories, even if we don't get the opportunity to act on them.

The article lays out four major thematic tropes of the emotionally engaging side of horror: When Losing Someone Makes Things That Much Worse, When Your Loved One Turns Monsterous, When Hope is Your Worst Enemy, The Fear of Dying Alone. Show approaches these issues both in Monster of the Week format and also deeply thematically; more than a show about horror it's utilizes these emotional punches dramatically to future the narrative, along with spurting blood as Dean gets ripped apart by invisible dogs.

There was a discussion on spnroundtable about whether or not Supernatural is a scary show, but I think that that question has less to do with the horror genre than people tend to think it does. Think of the difference between the word "horror" and "thrill"; certainly while they tend to be used similarly they are not the same at all. Supernatural has a very good grip on its genres, encompassing not only horror and thrillers but also westerns, slapstick, and Lifetime movies (shut up I am counting it as a genre).

Horror is about our anxieties yes, but not just about our phobias. Thus the fear of clowns isn't actually that of clowns but of false faces — the intentional malicious deception of everyone with a smile, with only a clown's eyes revealing its true face. Being unable to detect the body language signals is deeply disturbing for some people. Which is why with good reason that episode reads as a pedophilia episode.

But describing Supernatural as a horror tv show does it a disservice, I think. I've had of standing opinion that the writing is very intelligent, and good at paying attention to its roots and developing from there. But more than that, it has integrated different thriller and horror ideas pretty coherently within individual episodes, while carrying the thematic overall. Domestic trauma, yadda yadda yadda.

On another note, why do people not understand it's not the rapists and the murderers in The Road that are scary, rather, it's the cannibals that keep people as food sources locked in their basement?

One day I will talk about a soldier's duty, faith in command structure, uncertainty, moral choices and culpability, and why Dean and Cas are bffs. There's a lot you can talk about the show academically besides the curious kinks of fanfiction authors on the internet.