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Hell House - Recap
Episode seventeen opens in Richardson , Texas , two months ago with four teenagers going to investigate the local haunted house, also known as “Hell House”. There are strange symbols painted on the walls and the group makes their way through the house by the light of a flashlight. The legend of the house is recounted: The ghost lives in the root cellar and goes after girls, it strings them up and kills them. Skeptical, the others follow to the root cellar. Joking about the whole thing one of the boys notes that the others are staring over his shoulder in horror and he turns to see the strung up body of a girl.
Present day we join Sam and dean driving down a Texas road with Sam sleeping in the passenger seat. Dean puts a spoon in his mouth and takes a picture of it before turning up the music full blast to jolt Sam awake. Irritated at the prank he tells Dean they aren't kids anymore but ends up declaring a prank war on Dean who's not in the least intimidated by it and tells him to ‘bring it on'. They are arriving in Richardson , Texas the location of the Hell House. Sam tells Dean about the legend of the house and the group of kids that saw the corpse in the root cellar, only when the police arrived there was no body and the police figured the kids were yanking their chain.
Knowing they were going to be passing though Texas Sam had surfed for local paranormal sites and found the story. The brothers go to get first hand accounts from the kids who were there and none of the details of the stories match up, different colors, different victim accounts. The last witness works in a record store, Craig, who is the one who told them the legend of the house in the first place. Pretending to be writers they get Craig to tell the story of the house to them.
Mordecai Murdock lived in the house in the 30's with his six daughters. It was the depression and his crops were failing. Without money to feed his children he decides a quick death is better than a slow one of starvation. So he chased them down and hung his children and then hung himself.
Investigating the house in the daylight they find their EMF detector is useless because there's still a live transformer at the house and it's messing with the readings. The symbols are from a variety of sources and there's one that seems familiar to Dean but he can't place it. So far it's looking like the police may be right and it's all a hoax. Hearing a sudden noise the brothers move to investigate, only to run into some self proclaimed paranormal investigators, Ed Zeddmore and Harry Spengler. They are full of themselves but admit they have never actually seen a ghost, heard one knock a vase over but never saw one.
Leaving them to their investigation Sam and Dean head to the Heritage Hall and find there wasn't a Mordecai but there was a Martin that lived in the house. He however had two sons and there's no evidence that he killed himself or anyone else. There was also no evidence of matching missing persons for the dead girl, it's decided the whole thing is a dead end.
Getting back in the car Dean gets his first prank as he turns the key and gets the blasting radio and everything all turned on waiting for him. Score one for each brother.
That night another group of kids is heading to the Hell House. Truth or dare players one girl has to go to the root cellar and steal one of the jars to complete her dare. In the cellar instead of retrieving her jar she meets the spirit and is strung up and killed.
Sam and Dean see the body being taken from the house the next morning, the police think the dead girl killed herself by hanging, but the brothers think they've missed something. That night when they return to investigate they run into Zeddmore and Spengler and use them as a diversion to keep the police away while they investigate the house. Dean is still thinking that one of the symbols seems familiar but they make their way to the root cellar to investigate.
They find the spirit in the basement but rock salt blasts don't seem to slow it down and it's carrying an axe instead of a noose. It's also solid enough to try and strangle Sam. On their way outside they bump into the paranormal investigators and leave them with their first sight of a real ghost. Needless to say they run away, right into the police where they get arrested leaving Sam and Dean in the clear.
Obsessing over the symbol in the hotel room they discover that a new chapter has been added to the website that describes the spirit as a former Satanist that had killed his victims with an axe before slitting his own wrists to kill himself. And Dean figures out where he knows the symbol from, it turns out to be from the cover of the Blue Oyster Cult album, which leads them back to Craig. It turns out the whole story was made up by Craig and his cousin, they painted the symbols and added the scary bits of décor. Until the story was added to the website it was just a story, but after that it took on a life of it's own.
At the coffee shop Sam tells Dean he thinks the spirit is actually a Tulpa, a Tibetan thought form. It seems one of the symbols painted on the wall is a Tibetan spirit sigil, which can be used to concentrate thought into form, and with a few thousand hits on the website there's a lot of thoughts being focused on the legend of Hell House. It explains the immunity to rock salt and the way it keeps changing. They need to find a way to fight an idea.
Sam also finds out Dean put itching powder in his underwear. Score Dean two, Sam one.
The bothers decide to use the paranormal investigators website to change the Tulpa into something that can be killed, feeding them a story that they found evidence of Mordecai and that he actually had shot himself and was afraid of guns with special rounds. They buy into it eagerly and the brothers wait in a local restaurant for the information to hit the website. It appears and they decide at nightfall to go kill the spirit.
And Dean finds out his hand has been super glued to his beer bottle. The prank war is tied again.
Unfortunately when they attack the spirit with the special bullets, it doesn't have any effect, and they have the two amateur investigators in their way. The server crashed and there was no way for the new story to spread. Left with no way to kill the Tulpa they manage to get Zeddmore and Spengler out of the house and burn it down. The Tulpa is tied to the house and with no house for people to enter they hope it will solve the problem. A quick and dirty solution but the best idea they can come up with on the fly.
On their way out of town, Sam and Dean decide to turn their pranks on Zeddmore and Spengler instead of each other, sending them out of town to accept a bogus movie deal with a dead fish in the backseat of their car.
Things are pretty much back to normal.
Review :
Instead of trying to keep up the intense feeling of the last few episodes, “Hell House” decided to move in a different direction. For now the focus was off the hunt for the demon that killed their mother, making the focus Sam and Dean themselves, giving an episode that is more of a character study than anything else. We've seen the brother's under pressure and in pain, so it was a nice break to see what they are like in the quieter times. It's almost impossible to keep up a constant building pressure of intensity throughout an entire season, if you never let up people become numbed to it so I applaud the choice of throwing in more humor and normal interaction between Sam and Dean.
You get to see some real brother interaction. The prank war was a nice touch, not enough pranks to be tiresome or to interfere with the story but enough to see how quickly they could escalate into something like Nair in the shampoo again. And yet like any good siblings they immediately closed ranks against outsiders and acted as one as it was needed.
At the same time the episode wasn't entirely humorous, there was some well done exploration of how belief shapes reality. As beliefs change so does what is perceived to be reality making what is taboo or truth change over time. Using a symbol for this action as well as a website was a nice touch, it implied how things mutate through the written media and people's belief in everything they read. Things can go from rumor on a page to stark reality just through the force of belief, after all almost everyone knows that there were large rallies where women burnt their bras in the 60s, even though that never really happened, but so many people have read it and talked about it that it's become true history.
I did think the moment at the end with Sam wondering how many things they had fought were there because people believed in them to be a little heavy handed. It felt like they didn't have faith in their own storytelling to get the point across to the viewer so they had to back it up with a summary statement.
I was disappointed that they did go with the Hollywood miraculous recovery power to heal completely and without scarring since the last time we saw them. Being completely healed it's probably been some months since they were with their father in Chicago .
Visually there is a rather nice shot using a mirror in the root cellar and the flashlight, where you're not quite sure if the girl in the shot and her reflection move at the same time or not due to the bouncing flashlight beam. It gives a little extra boost of creep level to the jar stealing scene. And the scene with Sam and Dean talking with the fire lighting half their faces was a nice visual touch, shadow and light at the same time.
Overall a very well done episode that was made to stand alone without heavy continuity ties.
Guest Stars:
A.J. Buckley - Ed Zeddmore
Shane Meier - Craig Thurston
Trivia
“Hell House” is also a novel by Richard Matheson about a group investigating a haunted house.
Every Halloween churches put on “Hell Houses” to scare the Hell out of teenagers. The best known one is in Texas and was the subject of the documentary of the same title.
WWBD - What would Buffy do, obviously a reference to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which had an episode in a Halloween haunted house where they painted a symbol on the floor from a book and awakened a demon into the house.
Step into the light Carol Ann - Bumper sticker on the trailer and a reference to Poltergeist a movie about a haunted house.
The music featured in the episode was from Blue Oyster Cult which was the symbol on the walls of the Hell House.
Zeddmore and Spengler are of course the names of two of the characters from Ghost Busters..
