‘Lazarus Rising’ in Supernatural: A Perfect Horror Gem

by Dr Alex Tankard

I have to begin by admitting that my favourite TV show is … hard to justify. When Supernatural reached the UK in 2006, it was advertised with a dreary video and the tagline ‘Scary just got sexy’. This was a lie on both counts. I recently tried to rewatch season 1: in the beginning, Sam and Dean were just two surly brothers fighting ghosts and avenging the deaths of interchangeable blonde women who were incinerated in their underwear by a demon or something … I gave up and rewatched The Americans (2013-18), which, unlike Supernatural, actually is scary and sexy (if you’re into bad wigs).

So why did I become hooked after such a bad start? In season 2, the Supernatural boys went up against a trickster god. True to form, this Loki wasn’t scary or sexy (no wig!), but it was a fun episode, and I think this is when the writers suddenly realised their ridiculous show actually worked better as a comedy. By season 3, Supernatural had found its proper rhythm as a blue-collar bro-dude Buffy the Vampire Slayer, with an endless stream of ridiculous monsters. Actually, in those early days, my favourite aspect of the show was the décor of the motels in which the boys stayed each week – sometimes Western- or fishing-themed, or ‘sexy’ with nasty black satin sheets and vibrating beds. The setting was small-town America, and the weather was drizzle (when do you ever see drizzle on American TV? Well, like many horror shows, Supernatural is filmed in Canada). No glamour, and no real grit – and it’s a surprisingly warm, reassuring show: it’s been there for me during some tough times …

Season 3 ended with Dean being dragged to Hell. This was the kind of ludicrous, gory, and temporary death we’d come to expect from Supernatural (death is never the end; Marvel’s Loki has died three times on screen, but Supernatural’s Loki has died at least five times, and his video-will is a homemade porn film). But then, just as the show accepted it was a hilarious mess of bro-dudes being eaten by invisible hellhounds (because writhing on the floor and screaming is cheaper than actual special effects), something wonderful happened.

The first episode of season 4, ‘Lazarus Rising’, is, in my opinion, one of the most beautiful pieces of television ever made [1]. After disorientating, Hellraiser-style flashes of Dean being tortured in Hell, we see him wake in his coffin and claw his way out of his grave: he stands in a blasted forest, the trees blown flat and radiating out from his grave – the epicentre of some mysterious explosion like the Tunguska meteorite in 1908 [2]. He stumbles through the countryside to a deserted gas station. No human life anywhere. He finds a hand-shaped burn on his shoulder where some invisible being lifted him out of Hell. An old TV-set bursts with static, and a high-pitched whine rises from nowhere, shattering the windows and showering Dean with glass. Is he still in Hell? Has he been resurrected to find the world ended in his absence? I saw 28 Days Later in the cinema and, after almost dying of pure terror, I emerged from the cinema dazed and surprised to discover human life still existed on earth, so I find these dreamlike early scenes of a deserted world deeply unsettling. Supernatural finally got scary.

[STOP NOW AND WATCH IT! SPOILERS FOLLOW …]

In fact, the apocalypse hasn’t happened (yet). Dean finds his way back to civilisation and his brother, but how was he rescued from Hell? What kind of monster would have that power? Nothing they have ever encountered before. The demons they interrogate are even more confused and frightened than they are. Something terrifying has laid its hand upon Dean. The brothers employ a psychic to contact this being in a séance: when she steals a glimpse of it in the ether, her eyes burst into flames and burn out of her head. Supernatural’s bro-dude horseplay is being undermined now by genuine menace. The new monster’s grotesque powers don’t fit with the logic of the show we’ve been following for three seasons: this being seems to exist as pure, ear-splitting sound, or eye-melting light. Dean and his mentor Bobby prepare to summon the monster. A traditional wooden barn, whitewashed inside, is scrawled with mystical sigils: when the monster approaches, it blasts the doors open and the lights explode in fountains of white sparks … and we see a small, bland man in a shabby trench coat. He is Castiel, an Angel of the Lord. The shadows of enormous feathered wings spread across the wall behind him.

Fans of the recent Good Omens TV adaptation should revisit seasons 4 and 5 of Supernatural, which were influenced quite openly by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman’s 1990 novel [3]. Castiel’s arrival took Supernatural in a new direction, and I often tell my Romanticism students to watch season 5 for its Byronic portrayal of vicious angels, a gentle, polite Lucifer, and an apocalyptic world in which God has abandoned His creation. Introducing biblical mythology to Supernatural was a brilliant, blasphemous move, but it could have been a disaster. Increasingly self-referential, Supernatural jokes about ‘jumping the shark’ (there’s even an episode called ‘Jump the Shark’ in season 5) by introducing ludicrous plot twists in a desperate scramble for ever-greater shocks and drama. The sudden revelation of angels in season 4 was, ostensibly, jumping the shark – a drastic shift in the Supernatural universe from godless vampire-ghost-demon-windego chaos to Divine order. However, ‘Lazarus Rising’ is such an exquisite gem of horror TV that, by the time we are allowed to witness the spectacular outstretched wings, the audience is prepared to accept this revelation. In fact, nothing less would satisfy us.

In ‘Lazarus Rising’, Supernatural’s characteristic combination of the fantastical and the mundane has been stretched to its furthest extreme: the monster is occupying the body of pious, boring man called Jimmy, but its initial manifestations – a hand-shaped burn, a high-pitched tone that shatters glass, or a blazing light – convey a whole new order of existence hidden inside that bland little body. The show’s set designers, whose hideous motel sets displayed their gift for balancing on the very edge of surreal, now turned this delicate balance to far more dramatic effect in the white barn, an ostensibly realistic set that is suddenly illuminated as a temple. The wings that unfurl only as shadows are, undoubtedly, another special-effects economisation, but this cheap trick becomes a tantalising glimpse of another dimension beyond human perception. The casting of Misha Collins as Castiel was a stroke of genius for a horror-comedy show: he can shift in a moment from brutal, dead-eyed celestial automaton to bewildered innocent – or, rather, his angry-kitten face enables him to be both at once, but never human (except when he is). Castiel is one of Supernatural’s rare successes in representing a being that is truly Other.

Above all, in a show devoid of subtlety or real scares, ‘Lazarus Rising’ shows an extraordinary restraint that recalls a masterclass in screen suspense from my childhood: Jurassic Park (1993). It’s easy to forget that the velociraptors remain hidden for most of the film, existing only as flashes of movement in the dark, or the screams of their victims [4].  ‘Lazarus Rising’ begins by setting a tone of eerie menace: the blasted trees, the abandoned store, the inexplicable resurrection, the high-pitched noise from nowhere. Dean’s flashbacks to Hell are disorientating close-up reaction shots, but they serve to misdirect us by keeping us (and him) focused on the infernal. Meanwhile, an empty diner piled with dead demons – their eyes burned out of their heads – warns us that a whole new level of evil is approaching. By the time the scruffy little man announces himself as an Angel of the Lord, the audience is ready to accept something entirely new.

Alex’s Supernatural Facts

§  Season 5 is the best series of any TV show ever made (this is indisputable), and Romanticism students should watch it.

§  In season 6, Sam becomes a soulless sociopath, and it’s a vast improvement.

§  ‘Lazarus Rising’ is beautiful, but my favourite episode is actually ‘Changing Channels’ in season 5, where Loki forces Sam to star in an infomercial about genital herpes.

§  In a season 6 episode called ‘Mannequin 3: the Reckoning’, people are murdered by evil mannequins controlled by a haunted kidney. This episode is Peak Supernatural.

Endnotes:

[1] ‘Lazarus Rising’, Supernatural, 4: 1, dir. by Kim Manners (Wonderland Sound and Vision/ Warner Bros.: aired 8^th September 2008 in US). Details of this episode can be found on the IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1222595/ [27/12/2017]; image is from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castiel_(Supernatural)#/media/File%3ACastiel_(supernatural).jpg [26/9/2019]

[2] See Melissa Hogenboom, ‘In Siberia in 1908, a huge blast came out of nowhere…’,  http://www.bbc.co.uk/earth/story/20160706-in-siberia-in-1908-a-huge-explosion-came-out-of-nowhere [24/12/2017].

[3] See Alexandra Ingham, ‘Good Omens was definitely the inspiration for certain characters in Supernatural’, https://spnhunters.com/2019/06/07/good-omens-inspiration-supernatural/ [26/9/2019]

[4] If you’ve forgotten why that film is so great – and if you’re studying Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) – see Emily Asher-Perrin, ‘What makes Jurassic Park such a damn good movie?’, https://www.tor.com/2015/06/09/what-makes-jurassic-park-such-a-damn-good-movie/ [27/12/2017].

Citation:

Alex Tankard, ‘“Lazarus Rising” in Supernatural: A Perfect Horror Gem’, Notes on Literature: For Readers and Writers, www.notesonliteraturechester.blogspot.co.uk [accessed Day Month Year]

About the Author:

Dr Alex Tankard is a Lecturer in English Literature in the Department of English, University of Chester, and is a member of the Schools Liaison Working Group, delivering lectures and activities for schools.

Alex teaches modules on Gothic literature, Romanticism, critical theory, and Victorian disability, and has started a new research project on queerness and disability in Marvel superhero movies and fanfiction. Unsurprisingly, Alex supervises dissertations on horror, disease, and perversion. You can follow on https://twitter.com/AlexTankard4