For fifteen years, John Winchester's wayward sons have been taking on mythical beings drawn
from folklore and mythology.
Of course, they're always a little bit tweaked to make for more exciting adventures, but
those original legends are sometimes even weirder than what we see on TV.
Here are the things that Supernatural gets "wrong" about a few interesting mythical beings.
Ever since Bram Stoker published his 1897 novel Dracula and brought blood-sucking fiends
to the world of pop culture, there have been countless vampire stories across all forms
of media.
As a result, it's nearly impossible to figure out what constitutes "real" vampire legends,
and most stories have to spend at least a little time listing off what does and doesn't
hold true from folklore.
Supernatural is no exception.
As early as Season 1, viewers see John Winchester giving his sons and, by extension, the audience,
a brief course in Vampire 101.
"Most vampire lore is crap, a cross won’t repel them, sunlight won’t kill them.
And neither will a stake to the heart."
On the show, vampires lack a few of their traditional weaknesses, but as with most things,
cutting off their heads will solve your vampire problem pretty quickly.
That leaves plenty of folkloric vampire traits on the table, though, like shape-shifting,
the aversion to running water or the idea that they're compelled to count things like
a handful of seeds if it's thrown into their path, giving a would-be victim time for a
hasty escape.
Weirdly enough, Sesame Street didn't make that one up.
While Supernatural's vampires can get by without stopping for a solid evening of counting grains
of salt, the show actually did come up with its own completely bizarre set of weaknesses
for its Draculas, There's "Vamptonite," a toxic drug made from blood and corn syrup
that burns the undead, and the Vampire Irradiation Gun, which harnesses the power of the atom
to turn vampire blood into poison.
That one's so effective that it's kind of weird that the Winchesters don't just blast
everything with radiation to see if it works, but to be fair, you don't even want to run
the tiniest chance that you're going to have to deal with a leprechaun who is also a Hulk.
On the show, banshees are ghostly women whose ear-piercing scream can drive their victims
to kill themselves, after which they snack on victims' frontal lobes.
Even by Supernatural standards, gobbling up the brains of people driven to end their own
lives is pretty grim, and might just be the most brutal depiction of the creature in all
of pop culture.
It's also a pretty big departure from the banshee from Irish mythology,
Supernatural shouldn't feel bad about getting this one wrong, since pretty much everyone
else does, including the X-Men.
In folklore, the banshee's loud scream is not harmful in itself.
Instead, these mournful spirits are wailing in sadness as they predict someone's death,
or herald the death of an absent loved one.
It's not the cause, it's a reaction of sadness, which makes the banshee a much more tragic
figure than the monster we see on the show.
But hey, at least with this particular monster, Sam and Dean Winchester actually acknowledge
that they're departing from the legends and doing something different.
"Banshees?"
“Banshees.
I thought banshees were good.”
“The ones tied to the fairy lore are, they cry out as a warning to a victim’s impending
death."
Have you ever noticed that Supernatural mainly features evil creatures who just happen to
look like regular human beings?
It's almost as though whatever sinister force is populating the world with all these evil
monsters has to work within a very specific budget.
Anyway, there are plenty of monsters for whom that makes perfect sense.
Vampires and werewolves are only recognizably non-human some of the time, for instance,
and many of the more obscure creatures are at least mostly human in appearance.
For some, however, showing them as a humanoid, two-legged person is a monumentally bizarre
choice, which is what viewers ran up against in Season 13, when a bunch of Norse gods showed
up and started hanging around.
Loki?
Sure, we're used to seeing that dude walking around.
Odin and Thor?
They've been depicted as a couple of hairy human-ish fellas since at least the 13th century.
But Sleipnir?
Really?
As you may already know, Sleipnir, despite being someone that Loki gave birth to after
a particularly eyebrow-raising round of shape-shifting, is not exactly man-shaped in the traditional
mythology.
He's a horse.
A horse with eight legs.
A horse with eight legs whose hooves struck the Earth and created a canyon 300 feet deep.
On the show, he's just a dude who eats a carrot at one point, and while that's fine, we can't
help but feel a little cheated that we didn't get a murder mystery where one of the suspects
was just a gigantic spider-horse with no explanation.
Yet another Supernatural enemy who mysteriously takes a budget-friendly human form in order
to prey on its victims is the Crocotta, which shows up in season 3.
"It's a Crocotta."
“Is that a sandwich?”
“It’s come kind of scavenger, mimics loved ones, whispers ‘come to me’ and lures
you into the dark and swallows your soul.”
"Crocotta right yeah that makes sense."
The big difference from real-life mythology here is that it when it feeds on people, it
can unhinge its jaw and reveal a mouthful of needle teeth, which is a pretty neat effect.
Here's the thing, though: the "real life" Crocotta, lifted from East African and Indian
folklore, is actually way easier to put in a live-action TV show than most of the other
monsters that Supernatural has had to hammer into human form.
Eight-legged horses might require a bit of work, but this is the one time that making
the monster a shape-shifting human was actually more difficult than the alternative.
See the original Crocotta is… a dog.
Like, that's it.
It's just a dog.
Or, if you want to get technical about it, a hyena.
Okay, so there's slightly more to it than that.
It's a dog that can talk and — like in the show — mimics a human voice to lure its
victims to their deaths.
The myth is thought to have its origins in the hyena and the fact that they kind of sound
like people laughing.
Considering that this is a show that did an entire episode crossing over with Scooby-Doo,
who is both a famous talking canine who is also a cartoon, it's hard to believe Supernatural
couldn't have given us a talking, man-eating dog if they'd wanted to.
Of course, then they would've had to deal with having an episode where our heroes kill
a talking dog with knives, so it's probably for the best that they went with Sad Mr. Needle
Mouth instead.
Sometimes, the only thing that carries over from myth and legend into Supernatural is
a name.
Such is the case for Dagon.
On the show, it's a fairly standard-issue demon, though a pretty powerful one.
As one of the Princes of Hell, Dagon has all the powers you'd expect, plus the uncanny
ability to melt a gun that can kill anything, which is the sort of thing that comes in awfully
handy if you're going to spend your time fighting professional demon-killers.
Off the screen, Dagon is an ancient god who goes back about 4,300 years to ancient Mesopotamia,
but is more commonly known from a cameo appearance in the Bible, which you can find in First
Samuel, chapter 5.
If you're not up on the Old Testament, the short version is that the Philistines stole
the Ark of the Covenant and brought it to a temple of Dagon, only to find out that when
they showed up the next morning, the statue of Dagon had fallen over, as though bowing
to the Ark.
That might not be where Supernatural lifted the name, though, since — with all due respect
to the First Book of Samuel — there's a much more pop culturally relevant place where
it appears prominently.
One of H.P.
Lovecraft's earliest stories was 1917's Dagon, in which the narrator encounters both a monolith
and one of Lovecraft's typically horrifying Deep Ones, describing it as, quote:
"Vast, Polyphemus like, and loathsome, it darted like a stupendous monster of nightmares
to the monolith, about which it flung its gigantic scaly arms, the while it bowed its
hideous head and gave vent to certain measured sounds."
Be honest: you would pay a good amount of money to hear Jensen Ackles growl his way
through calling something "Polyphemus-like," wouldn't you?
Aside from Sam and Dean Winchester, the most prominent member of the cast of Supernatural
is Castiel, the angel who fished Sam out of Hell back in Season 4 and became so beloved
by fans that he wound up sticking around for the next decade.
He's not the only angel to show up on the show by a long shot, and since they inhabit
mortal forms while they're hanging out on Earth, it's rare that viewers ever actually
get to see what they really look like.
On those rare occasions that we do, however, we get beings composed of a brilliant light,
complete with the wings you'd expect from classical depictions of God's messengers.
Presumably, this is because the show's budget would have a difficult time with gigantic
monsters made of fire with thousands of eyes and faces in weird places, because that's
the actual description of God's heavenly pals that shows up in the Bible.
Or one of them, at least — just like on the show, there are plenty of different kinds
of angels described in books like Ezekiel, Daniel, and Isaiah, and most of them are way
weirder than anything the CW could handle.
Cherubim, for instance, are not the friendly naked babies that make people fall in love,
they're creatures with four wings, brass hooves, and four faces: a lion, an ox, an eagle, and
a human who may or may not resemble Misha Collins.
And you thought the designers of Bayonetta were just weird.
To bring it back to Cass, he's promoted to the Seraphim in Season 5, and while he cracks
a few jokes about the massive, hologram-like nature of his true form…
"This is a vessel.
My true form is approximately the size of your Chrysler building."
...the capital-C Canonical description of the Seraphim is a little different.
According to Isaiah, the Seraphim are relatively Misha Collins-shaped, but with six wings.
Two for flying, two for covering their faces, and two for covering their feet.
While we're on the subject of angels, let's talk about Raphael.
While he's not the biggest troublemaker the Winchesters have encountered, he's popped
up in various plots, and even once attempted to restart the apocalypse after it had been
prevented.
And yes: the fact that someone can literally attempt to cause the apocalypse and not be
considered one of the Winchesters' worst foes should give you an idea of just how terrible
their lives can get.
"It is a testament to my unending mercy that I do not smite you here and now."
The Raphael we see on Supernatural couldn't be further from his canonical counterpart,
though.
The show depicts him as a severe, uncaring, and even cowardly, with little regard for
humanity.
In scripture, however, Raphael might be quick with a sarcastic comment, but is every bit
as loyal as the other Ninja Turtles, and his skill with the ancient art of ninjitsu is
— wait.
No, sorry.
Wrong Raphael.
Raphael the angel, as he appears in the Bible, is anything but uncaring.
In fact, he's the angel specifically associated with healing, showing up to rescue Lot from
the destruction of Sodom in the book of Genesis, and is generally assumed to be the angel who
stirs up a sort of first-century healing hot tub at Bethesda in the Gospel of John.
Of course, he also shows up in the Book of Tobit for what is basically an Old Testament
buddy cop comedy.
He disguises himself as a dude named Azariah and at one point just bails to go beat up
the demon Azazel, which is basically just an episode of Supernatural already.
With all the stuff like angels and trips to Heaven being used as plot points, It's pretty
obvious that Supernatural lifts a fair amount of material from Jewish and Christian theology
and legends.
Even God Himself shows up to hang out with the main characters with a frequency not seen
since the Book of Genesis.
"You...
God?"
The show does, however, deviate from canon in some pretty notable ways, and one of them
was the big villain of Season 11.
There have been a lot of close readings of the Bible over the years, but even the most
liberal examination omits one key thing that Supernatural based a whole year and change
of storylines around: God is not, traditionally speaking, depicted as having an older sister.
Supernatural, however, gives us Amara, and like many older sisters, she has to deal with
far more strict punishments than her Little Brother.
Like, say, being sealed away in a formless void since the dawn of time after a war against
her Li'l Bro and His squad of archangels.
Admittedly, that's a bit harsher than what most older sisters experience, like being
grounded for sneaking out, but it's the same basic idea, and definitely makes for an incredibly
awkward visit at family gatherings, especially Christmas.
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