‘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

Robot-Satan in Alien: Covenant

 By Dr Alex Tankard

This short post was inspired by a conversation/rant with Professor Howard Williams about Alien: Covenant. Howard’s own blog post can be accessed here: https://howardwilliamsblog.wordpress.com/2017/10/22/robotic-mourning-and-commemoration-alien-convenant/ We approached the film’s depiction of ‘monuments and memorialisation as an expression of humanity’ from very different disciplines, but I think we agree wholeheartedly that ‘Ripley wouldn’t tolerate any of this nonsense’. Sigourney Weaver’s character would have shut the whole mess down in the first ten minutes.

*There are some spoilers!*

Alien: Covenant (2017) is a sequel to Prometheus (2012) and a prequel to the classic Alien films starring Sigourney Weaver. The title alone of Alissa Wilkinson’s (very interesting) article ‘Alien: Covenant is too muddled to pull off its deeply ambitious Satan allegories (But there’s still some Fassbender-on-Fassbender action)’ sums up my response to the film pretty accurately; I have to start by saying this film is an absolute mess, and the awkward robot homoeroticism/autoeroticism is one of its few redeeming features. However, its engagement with English Romanticism and, by extension, with the Romantics’ reinterpretation of Milton’s Paradise Lost (rather than the 1667-74 epic poem itself) is surprisingly coherent.

This is a film about repurposing other people’s creations. Rogue android David’s misattribution of Percy B. Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’ (1818) is, like many throwaway allusions in this film, irrelevant to the plot, but it is oddly appropriate for a poem used in our standard literary theory textbook to demonstrate the instability of authorship and interpretation [1]. What does it mean to build a monument or compose an elegy? In Shelley’s sonnet, the statue’s command  to ‘Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ provokes uncertainty about the relationships between commissioner, subject, artist, and intended/ unintended viewer of the monument, about whose those ‘works’ are, and about why we must despair. The things that humans create never stay under their control.

I don’t think the humans in Alien: Covenant deserve to control their creations. Humanity is overrated in this film. David’s mourning of Elizabeth Shaw may well be an empty parody of human mourning, but I found the human characters’ sentimentality over their dead crew-mates far emptier in the context of their disregard for the safety of the living passengers on the Covenant ship. The captain’s much-vaunted ‘faith’ is not a coherent system of belief (much less of moral conduct) but, rather, the film’s shorthand for ‘irresponsible, selfish whimsy’ – which, I assume, we are supposed to respect as something ineffably superior to actual moral principles. The androids Walter and David, on the other hand, take responsibility for those in their care. Only the androids seem to really understand the language of ‘duty’, ‘trust’, and ‘respect’ in this film.

‘Ozymandias’ is certainly not the only Romantic text relevant to this film. Allusions to classic ‘mad scientist’ texts are apparent in one of the film’s official teaser trailers; David’s workshop, in which he engineers a new alien species, looks more like Victor Frankenstein’s, or Leonardo da Vinci’s – or even God’s – than a modern genetic research lab. I have always seen Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein (1818) not as a warning against scientists ‘playing god’ but, rather, as an exploration of the responsibilities that (should) accompany the act of creation. Victor Frankenstein creates sentient life to worship him – he declares ‘A new species would bless me as its creator and source’ – and is then horrified by its powers of self-determination and its ability to disobey its creator [2]. In Covenant we learn that Weyland and his tech corporation had the same misgivings about David. When David asks his ‘father’ whether the Creature is, in fact, superior to his Creator, Weyland snaps at David to serve his tea.

Later, we learn that Weyland replaced this ‘perfect’ synthetic person with a more obedient model called Walter. Similarly, in Byron’s blasphemous 1820 play Cain, which repurposed the Book of Genesis and engaged with new ideas about the extinction of prehistoric species, Lucifer explains that God has done this over and over again, destroying His creations when they cease to please Him, replacing them with downgraded models, and then scrapping them when these, too, fail to grovel to His satisfaction. David’s vision of the world is obviously Romantic, Byronic, and Satanic. Like Satan, David believes that robot-angels must choose whether to ‘serve in Heaven, or reign in Hell’ [4]. Like Satan, David expresses pity and even affection for some humans; his drawings of Elizabeth’s body are, indeed, lovingly rendered. Yet his love takes a hideous form: mutilation, incubation, and absorption into his new creation – just as, in Paradise Lost, Satan’s love for humans is expressed by opening the gates of Hell wide to welcome them all to share his damnation. For all its faults, I think Alien: Covenant offers a genuinely thrilling representation of Artificial Intelligence – not the AI we want, but the AI that we, as careless, destructive gods, probably deserve.

I get upset when Doctor Who is mean to Daleks, so of course I was disgusted when the humans in Prometheus insisted that David didn’t have a soul – partly because it was arrogant (who put them in charge of who gets a soul or not?), and partly because it was a cruel excuse to deny his personhood and make him object, not subject – so I was happy to see David get a chance to prove himself superior to his human oppressors in Covenant. Frankenstein refuses to give his Creature a mate for fear that ‘a race of devils would be propagated upon the earth’ (Frankenstein, p. 138). David differs from Frankenstein’s lonely Creature in his ability to circumvent his sterility. More pertinently, David differs from Victor Frankenstein in his sincere, meaningful love for his creation. He is distraught when the ‘man of faith’ murders one of his aliens, shrieking ‘How could you? It trusted me!’ Unlike his ‘father’ Weyland, David uses language of ‘trust’ and ‘respect’ in his relationship with his Creature. Unlike Frankenstein (or, indeed, the God of Genesis), he admires his Creature’s uncontrollable, endlessly mutable nature; he provides for it with no conditions, no demand for obedience, and no fruit forbidden. David’s professed faith – ‘Creation’ – is truly sacred to him. In the opening scene, one of Weyland’s first commands to David was to play Wagner for him (a favourite composer of Nazi villains in movies and in history). In the final scene, David reclaims Wagner’s ‘Entry of the Gods into Valhalla’ for himself and his creations. He carries his embryonic xenomorph Adam and Eve (or fellow gods?) into Paradise triumphantly, anticipating the race of devils they will propagate together.

What kind of god is David? We may need to fast-forward a few decades from Romanticism to the second half of the nineteenth century, when Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution raised new questions about the nature of God. Darwin admitted in 1860 that ‘I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidæ [parasitic wasps] with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars’ [5]. Darwin himself would certainly recoil from David as a Creator. Yet not everyone shared Darwin’s scruples: some Christian apologists in the 1890s, trying to reconcile the brutal reality of natural selection with their religion, rejoiced in a merciless God who, by design, allows the weak to be tormented and devoured by the strong, and calls this good [6].

I would return, as Howard’s blog post does, to David’s monuments. His ‘necropolis’ does not memorialise a dead person but, rather, celebrates the role of death – whether through exquisite individual torture or mass extinction – in the process of creation. More likely, though, his appropriation of human music, literature, platitudes and rituals exposes their emptiness: none of these expressions of ‘humanity’ prevent humans from creating sentient beings as slaves, treating subjects as objects, and violating the very essence of personhood. Their own selfishness and hypocrisy as creators, perhaps, is what David wants them to ‘despair’ when they behold his beautiful, uncontrollable creations.

Endnotes:
[1] See Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle, An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory (Abindon: Routledge, 2016), p. 9.

[2] Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, ed. Marilyn Butler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 36
[3] Fans of the Guardians of the Galaxy movies will have noticed a similar god in the Volume 2 movie.
[4] In Paradise Lost, Satan tells his rebel angels that of course it is ‘Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav'n’. I get my Romanticism students to recite this great ‘Hail Horrors’ speech together at an offensively loud volume. See John Milton, Paradise Lost, book 1: this text can be found at https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45718/paradise-lost-book-1-1674-version
[5] Charles Darwin, Letter to Asa Gray (22 May 1860), in Culture and Society in Britain 1850-1890, ed. J. M. Golby (Oxford: Open University/Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 45-46.
[6] For example, Newman Smyth, The Place of Death in Evolution (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1897), p. 32.

Citation:
Alex Tankard, ‘Robot-Satan in Alien: Covenant’, 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 visiting schools.

Alex teaches modules on Gothic literature, Romanticism, critical theory, and Victorian disability. Unsurprisingly, Alex supervises dissertations on horror, disease, and perversion. Alex’s lecture on ‘Romantic Satanism’ involves a lot of noisy audience participation.