'Supernatural' Thursdays

For the past 2 months or so, I have been staying home on Thurday nights to catch my current favourite TV series, 'Supernatural'. With a lot of series nowadays featuring lawyers, doctors and housewives, this series brings back the horror/sci-fi genre that has been short supply recently since we saw X-Files many years ago. (Of course, I won't even bother categorising Charmed and Buffy in the same genre.)

The pilot episode starts with the Winchester couple, their young son, Dean, and their baby boy, Sam. One night the mother wakes up to hear the baby crying in the next room. She heads to Sam’s room, where she sees a shadowy figure that she thinks is her husband standing over the crib. Eventually she realises it's not her husband when she goes downstairs and finds her husband sleeping on the couch.

Panicked, she rushes back up to Sam's room. John, the husband wakes up to his wife's screams and goes running to their baby's room only to find his wife dead and fire spreading out from her body. John tells Dean to take baby Sam outside and made a desperate and futile attempt to save his wife while the house was consumed by flames.

20 years later, Sam is about to apply to law school and is living with his beautiful girlfriend, Jessica. But one night Dean shows up and tells him their father is missing. Sam is skeptical at first. His father has been missing before and has always made it home. Then Dean tells Sam their father was on a hunt, looking for the thing that killed his wife since she died.

The brothers traced John to Jericho, California, where they found more clues about their father's location. But Sam declined his brother's invitation to continue the search, opting instead to return to his life with Jessica. Unfortunately, shortly after arriving in his apartment he finds Jessica pinned to the bedroom ceiling and bleeding from the abdomen. As Sam watched helplessly, she burst into flames, just like how his mother died 20 years ago.

Dean rescues his brother from the burning apartment. Sam eventually decides to resume the search for the demon who killed his mother and his girlfriend. The brothers then picked up the trail of clues leading to the whereabouts of their missing father.

From then on, we see the brothers travelling from town to town each week in search of their father and battling evil spirits and ghouls along the way.

'Supernatural' is something we don't see a lot on TV these days. Even though some of the episodes are not very original, some of the scenes will still scare the hell out of you. Each episode features a different ghost or creature based on some superstition or folklore, such as the Lady in White (who stands by lonely roads and lures men to their death), the Red Indian beast known as Wendigo, killer bugs and Bloody mary (a long-haired female ghost who comes crawling out of a mirror, ala The Ring).

Overall, I would recommend this series to all horror fans out there.