Supernatural, 1.01: Pilot

Here it is! Here we go! The first post of MOTWP, covering the first episode of the first season of Supernatural.

I've got Opinions. Buckle up.

THE STORY SO FAR
(recap, focusing on monster-of-the-week-related elements)

We start with the happy Winchester family: Dad, Mom, Big Brother (Dean) and Baby Brother (Sam, who is a literal baby when this episode starts). Mama Mary gets murdered on the ceiling of Sam's nursery in a horrific firey supernatural bloodbath/fire pool.

Cut to the future, where Sam is about to interview for law school (is that a thing?). Fate will not allow it: Winchester Dad has disappeared, and Dean, who's been hunting monsters, is worried.

We learn through a scene with a Supernatural Victim Of The Week (TM) that there's a spooky lady who asks men for a ride, makes out with them, then kills them.

After some research, we learn that a local woman committed suicide in the 1980's after she accidentally drowned her children. The Winchesters find dad's hotel along with all his notes and we're told that this bugaboo is a Lady in White: a restless spirit of a woman who learned her husband was unfaithful, killed her children in a fit of temporary insanity, then killed herself.

Dean gets arrested, Sam escapes but the ghostly lady shows up in the car. She threatens him, he says she can't kill him because he hasn't been unfaithful. She forces herself upon him (yikes), saying that he will be unfaithful, presumably due to the fact that she's sexually assaulting him. She goes from spooky to demon-skull-scary. Sam drives Dean's car into her old home, and her ghostly children embrace her, saying "Welcome home, mommy." She then explodes into...more ghosts.

Sam decides to keep on his law school track, which is interrupted by his girlfriend, Jess, dying terribly in the same way Mama Mary did.

aaannnnd SCENE.

SO GET THIS...
(the folklore behind the episode)

First, let me lay my cards on the table: contemporary legends involving the road are a special interest of mine, especially when there's a supernatural element. What I'm saying is: this episode is extremely on-brand for me.

Now, onto the fun stuff: what we're given in the episode. According to Sam, our resident folklore nerd, what we're seeing here is a type of ghost called Women in White. Women in white are ghostly spirits who were married to unfaithful men. When they discovered their husbands' infidelity they killed their children in a fit of temporary insanity, then committed suicide. They spend their unrestful, ghostly afterlives luring unfaithful men to their deaths.

If we look at the folklore behind the episode, Supernatural's inaugural monster is actually a combination of three different traditions: women in white, hitchhiking ghosts, and La Llorona.

Women in White

Women in white are a broad category of ghosts seen worldwide. There's not really a specific, uniting story that categorizes them -- they're simply ghostly women, dressed in white, whose deaths were some sort of tragedy. Women in white carry a sense of purity with them: they're the victims, not the villains, of their stories.

Vanishing Hitchhikers

Vanishing hitchhikers are usually ghosts who thumb a ride and then vanish. Sometimes they're driven back to their house, where a grieving loved one explains that their wife/daughter (the deceased is often a young woman) died tragically. Sometimes, there's a religious element: there's a Mormon subset of these legends, some Hawaiian-specific ones, and even a category where the hitchhiker is Jesus Christ himself.

Hitchhiking ghosts are usually spooky, not malevolent. For more info on them, check out the "Ghost Stories" entry in American Folklore or Jan Harold Brunvand's classic (and highly readable) The Vanishing Hitchhiker.

VANISHING HITCHHIKER SIDEBAR FOR NERDS:

If you're intrigued by vanishing hitchhikers or highway mythology, please do yourself a favor and read Seanan McGuire's Sparrow Hill Road, which does some phenomenal worldbuilding with American road myths.

La Llorona

La Llorona-themed ofrenda

Our pilot episode features a high-profile ghost: La Llorona (usually translated "wailing woman" or "weeping woman") is a wide-spread Latin American story of a ghostly woman who murdered her children. The story is also widely told in the American Southwest and in Latinx families across the US. The Texas State Historical entry on La Llorona says that she's "perhaps the most widely known ghost in Texas".

So, what's her deal?

Sometimes La Llorona is a generic character, her story told in with fairy-tale style genericness. Other times the ghost is that of a more realistic woman, often from a minority background (perhaps lower class or Indigenous). All La Llorona stories, though, have recognizable elements. Kenneth L. Untiedt's Folklore: In All of Us, In All We Do neatly summarizes her story for us:

"Ambiguity exists regarding the physical appearance of La Llorona, ranging anywhere from a beautiful woman dressed in white to a horrifying monster clothed in black, or even to death itself. Essentially, La Llorona fits a pattern: she had a sexual relationship with a man outside her social class, which produced a child or children; he abandoned her for a woman from a higher social status; she killed her children, usually by drowning; and now she haunts water areas looking for the souls of her dead children so that she can find peace and enter the kingdom of God. The legend of La Llorona has been used to teach lessons in the Hispanic culture: to young Hispanic females not to fool around outside their social class, to young children as a scare tactic to gather into the home before dark, and to wayward husbands not to stray outside of their marriage."

That describes...most of this episode pilot, really. The pilot switched the Spanish name for a more generic English one and threw in some vanishing hitchhiker flavor, but the story is still recognizably that of La Llorona.

RENEE'S NITPICKING SIDEBAR

 (A voicemail plays where John Winchester speaks, static playing over and between the words) 

SAM: You know there's EVP on that?

DEAN: Not bad, Sammy. Kinda like riding a bike, isn't it?

Welcome to Renee's Nitpicking Sidebar, where I get all too nitty-gritty and over-explain some relatively minor plot point, throw-away line, or non-essential folklore tidbit! Tonight, on our inaugural installment, we're talking about EVP.

Let's start with the basics: EVP means electronic voice phenomena. Here's the idea: you go somewhere spooky, you make some recordings, then you play them back with various processing techniques (often as simple as adjusting speed and volume) and search for ghostly voices you were unable to hear when you, yourself, were in the spooky place. (If you're interested in a deeper overview, Wikipedia has you covered.)

You ready for my incredibly minor bone to pick with this bit of dialogue in the pilot? Sam listened to a recording, heard static and funny sounds, and called *that* EVP. EVP isn't just static associated with ghosts -- it's got to be interpreted as voices. A more accurate re-write of Sam's line might be, "You check that for EVP?"

I could take some time here to complain that EVP usually just sounds like a word or phrase, and only sort of, at that. (Here's a YouTube video with examples.) But I won't -- this is clearly a story choice, given that the Supernatural world is filled with, ah, supernatural phenomenon. But confusing EVP with static? That's just lazy.

ANALYSIS CORNER
(thoughts and such)

I am going to do my best to keep the "thoughts" segment of these posts short and sweet, partly because I'm assuming it's less interesting to you folk, and partly because I really don't want this to become an analysis blog. This is a blog about using Supernatural and The X-Files as jumping-off points for exploring at folklore, not a blog for dissecting TV plots and removing pearls of Pure Folklore or something.

That being said, there are two niggling problems I have with this episode.

First: the writers clearly based this story on La Llorona, but removed all Latin American elements from the story. (Both Supernatural and TXF struggle with similar appropriation and giving-credit-where-it's-due problems -- my usual tactic on this blog will be to acknowledge when this happens and, if appropriate, link to someone outside articles for those who want deeper analysis. You're always welcome to comment with your (constructive and civil) thoughts, or, even better, link to other in-depth outside articles.) 

Second: what's the logic for the wandering hitchhiker elements? We're not told the woman hitchhiked, she didn't die in a car crash, there wasn't any car-specific element to her husband's infidelity or her children's death. While American Folklore: An Encyclopedia informs me that La Llorona and vanishing hitchhiker stories can sometimes share elements, there doesn't really seem to be any internal logic for the combination here.

My final thoughts? Supernatural is one of the few shows that really digs into contemporary American legends, right from the get-go, which is why I love it. It also hits some other buttons for me: sibling stories, road stories, people taking care of each other, classic rock, walk-the-earth stories, and, of course, monster-of-the-week tales. I love vanishing hitchhikers, and small bands crusading against evil, and vicariously living through people who read about monsters in the newspaper and hop in the car and just go. Which is why I enjoy the show in the first place, and why I'm doing this at all.

Anyway, if you're still reading, thanks for joining me. If you have thoughts to share, I'd love to hear them.

☕