For teens in 2005, Supernatural proved to be a gateway to modern horror

Before it lost itself to fan service, Eric Kripke's show was a genuinely scary, proto-version of the grief-based thrills that rule the genre today.

By Emma Keates | August 12, 2025 | 7:00am

Screenshot: Netflix/The WB

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For teens in 2005, Supernatural proved to be a gateway to modern horror

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A boy walks into a dark room and sees the charred remains of his father lying on the floor. As he stares, the camera pans to reveal a vision so ghastly that it makes that initial horror feel almost comforting, like something from a Sunday morning cartoon or perhaps a Goosebumps novel. The ashes aren’t moving. The mom hovering over her son on the ceiling sure will though.

Anyone still jumpy around telephone poles seven years on will recognize that as the start of one of the scariest scenes in Hereditary, a film The A.V. Club deemed “the most traumatically terrifying horror movie in ages.” I’m not going to pretend my stomach didn’t leap so high into my throat it felt like it would join Toni Collette’s character on the ceiling the first time I watched it. But something about the scene also felt oddly nostalgic, as if I’d seen it somewhere before.

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I had the same feeling the first time I watched The Haunting Of Hill House, a series The A.V. Club called, quite similarly to the film rave above, “the most traumatic horror story of the year.” That time, it was in response to a scene in the premiere, in which a flawed but ultimately well-intentioned father scoops up his son and tells him to close his eyes and not look back under any circumstances as he sprints toward the door of his very haunted house. As they reach the car, the boy’s terrified siblings, who had already been ferried to safety, beg and plead for their mom, who they’ll never see alive again. In a moment of pure terror, the dad had decided to save his kids and leave their mom behind in that cursed home with all of its ghosts and darkness. It’s the foundational wound that would go on to determine—and, for some, ultimately destroy—the rest of his kids’ lives.

This time, I knew exactly why the scene felt so familiar. I’d seen one just like it before in another pilot that had aired more than a decade prior. The image of John Winchester (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) ordering his young son to take his brother outside and not look back (“Now, Dean. Go!”) bubbled up like it was the defining episode of my own childhood. In a way, it was—at least as it would go on to dictate a thirst for anything that can reasonably be labeled “traumatically terrifying” that I’ve never quite been able to quench.

I’m talking, of course, about Mary Winchester (Samantha Smith) burning on the ceiling in the first few minutes of Supernatural. We’ve seen plenty of moms on ceilings and even a few parents spontaneously combust in the years since Supernatural kicked off in September 2005, but at the time, at least for me, it was shocking. I’d had some juvenile experience with horror, but it had always been something along the lines of “family moves into spooky old house, ghosts throw things and make lights flash, family leaves” or “girl finds creepy doll in basement, creepy doll kills pet/neighbor/whoever, girl throws creepy doll away.” I’d never seen the horror come from within a family unit itself or fester over the course of a lifetime like it did for little Dean (played by Jensen Ackles as an adult), tasked with the safety of his brother at such a young age, or even littler Sam (portrayed by Jared Padalecki as a grown-up), who lay wailing in his crib as Mary burned.

We later learn that Mary’s death came at the hands of the yellow-eyed demon Azazel, whose small arc in season one ends up tying into the convoluted battle between heaven and hell that propelled the overarching plot from season two onward. I say that with a lot of affection, but even the most die-hard Supernatural fans likely wouldn’t be hard-pressed to admit that the show could sometimes be a lot. It’s easy to forget, but the series’ initial outing was mostly free from leviathans, trickster gods, and angels who gripped men tight and raised them from perdition. In their place was a far more relatable monster: grief.

For a show that aired on The WB (it later moved to The CW) and was mostly aimed at teens and young adults, Supernatural did a remarkable job of portraying the innumerable and unexpected ways grief fundamentally alters everything it touches—from people to places to lifelong belief systems. We see it in this first episode alone, as Sam grows up and tries to outrun the memory of the body suspended over his head by going to college and leading a “normal” life—one in which he’s rewarded, in turn, by yet another body, burning and bleeding just like his mom’s when he was an infant. It’s his girlfriend’s this time, but the pain is the same. It’s the only demon Sam and Dean can never truly kill.

Sure, the show had its share of classic, monster-of-the-week-style haunts. For my money, a lot of them could still rival any low-budget slasher today, oft-questionable CGI and all. (Of course, some, uh, couldn’t. I’m looking at you, racist truck.) I still don’t love the idea of watching the Bloody Mary episode alone in a dark room, for example. But even with all its bleeding eyes and castigating reflections, the underlying horror of that episode had more to do with the fact that Mary was targeting people wracked by guilt and shame than the more pedestrian creep factor of the old urban legend. The dead girl in pale makeup isn’t what sticks with you years after the fact; it’s the psychic wound of pain caused unto others reflected back onto the self.

These are the same waters that so many popular horror films wade in today. The trend of literalizing personal and domestic trauma into visceral onscreen terror —spurred on by A24, Neon, and the like—has already been dissected at length by The A.V. Club and other outlets. We don’t need to relitigate that whole discussion here, but the onset of the trend didn’t come as a surprise. Its origin—at least in its current form—is often traced back to Hereditary (see our own headline above), but its roots go much deeper than that. Grief-based horror was obviously a phenomenon long before Sam, Dean, or even their dear, departed mother were born, but for me—and many future adrenaline junkies of my generation—the show provided one of the first bits of evidence that the genre could hit so much harder than the things that go bump in the night.

As Supernatural trudged on into its eighth, ninth, and eventually 15th seasons, its legacy was somewhat marred by faulty plotting, excessive fan service, and its general status as the show that just didn’t know when to quit. But those first five seasons—the ones that represented the original vision of Eric Kripke (who would go on to spearhead The Boys after departing Supernatural in 2010)—are as deserving of a spot in TV’s hallowed, haunted halls as Hill House or anything of that ilk. Oh, and King Paimon and his crew? Sam and Dean could have taken them down with some silver bullets and a handful of salt in 45 minutes or less. No ceiling crawl required.