“A Shot on the Devil”: Female Hunters and the Identification of Evil in Supernatural

Supernatural relates to the Gothic ancestry of horror, where terror arises from supernatural agents rather than the atrocities of crime and war. But one element ties the Gothic to the contemporary: the emphasis on the vulnerability of family. Robin Wood observes that in the 1970s horror moved from the Europe of the (Gothic) past to contemporary (post-1970s) America, where family is the source of both security and threat. The obsession with family relations and their vulnerability drives much of Supernatural. Sam (Jared Padalecki) and Dean (Jensen Ackles) Winchester’s desire for family—and connections with significant women—is consistently thwarted by the dangers around them. They live in the world of the “hunter” where family is vulnerable. Evil often invades “the life” and malevolency follows. The series can be read as Sam and Dean’s constant quest to keep each other safe while they protect the normal world from the world of monsters. Domesticity, then, creates an opportunity to study how evil is constructed in the show. At the same time, as both Julia M. Wright and Lorrie Palmer have argued, Supernatural presents a primarily masculine point of view and the understanding of evil in Supernatural is almost exclusively masculine, with only a few exceptions.