Is there garlic on this pizza? An oral history of Supernatural's 'Monster Movie' episode
THE BEGINNING
What started as a simple enough idea — a black-and-white episode — was then put into the hands of writer Ben Edlund, who’d already crafted some of the show’s more creative hours, including “Hollywood Babylon,” which marked one of the series’ first meta episodes, and “Ghostfacers,” which was shot like a cheesy ghost-hunting reality show using handheld cameras. Alongside Edlund was director Robert Singer, an executive producer on the series and a massive movie fan himself.
ERIC KRIPKE (Creator): I was an obsessive fan of The X-Files and in their prime, they got really bold and adventurous with their format, and they had a black-and-white episode. I was always hoping that we could start taking those same kinds of swings. I remember saying, “I want to do a black-and-white episode where Sam and Dean are up against the classic movie monsters.” But I think Ben came up with the shapeshifter. We were trying to figure out: How do you get a mummy and a werewolf and a Frankenstein and a Dracula in the same episode? That makes no f---ing sense. So this idea of a shapeshifter who loved those movies and was ultimately just a fanboy was the secret to cracking that one open.
ROBERT SINGER (Director): I think that script was Ben at his best. I was really happy that I was in line to direct because I really loved those old movies, so it was fortuitous that I got to do it.
JENSEN ACKLES (Dean Winchester): It’s all just paying homage to the old-school ways of doing things, which having Bob at the helm, he’s seen all those movies time and time again, so he was the perfect guy to direct this episode.
KRIPKE: Bob has an encyclopedic knowledge of movies, especially older films. He’s a classicist and his directing style is a lot of that kind of beautiful, elegant Hollywood style, and I think he just really relished it.
SINGER: I shot generally with wider lenses than I would normally do with Supernatural to try to give it some of that old-time feel. I really took pains to make it look as old fashioned as I possibly could. I’m a big fan of James Whale, who had done Frankenstein, and there are a lot of great crane shots in those movies, so I did a lot of crane work in this. We did a lot of shadow play.
JARED PADALECKI (Sam Winchester): You put Ben Edlund on writing and Bob Singer on directing and magic is bound to happen.
But there was another piece of the puzzle that needed to come together for the magic to truly work: Who would play the shapeshifter (and therefore spend the episode doing their best Dracula)? The answer was Todd Stashwick.
TODD STASHWICK (Dracula): They wanted a full-on replication of Bela Lugosi’s performance. I had the DVD of the 1930’s Dracula, so I was watching that just to get the mannerisms and vocal intonation down so that I wasn’t doing a Xerox carbon copy but rather actually trying to get that Hungarian dialect that he has. I went in [to the audition] and just swung for the rafters.
SINGER: We had him do one of the Dracula scenes and then do the speech where he’s telling her how he became the way he became and Todd just killed it. That was an easy call to cast him.
STASHWICK: They wanted to know that you were going to be able to bring both sides to it, the full-on studied Dracula performance and then to let that mask drop and see the wounded man that is the monster.
KRIPKE: We needed someone who could stick the landing on the Dracula part and that’s really hard. It’s hard to do it and have it not come off like a bit. Todd is a remarkable mimic of Bela Lugosi and brings humanity and soulfulness and depth to it. There’s something in his eyes that made it deeper and sadder than had you cast someone who was just going for an impersonation.
PADALECKI: That episode belongs to Todd Stashwick. He’s so damn good.
Alongside Stashwick was Melinda Sward, whose character Jamie, a local waitress, caught Dean's eye and marked a first for the show.
KRIPKE: At the time, there was a young female fan named Jamie. She and her mother would write us letters and they were super fans, and we were still early enough that we’re like, “I can’t believe there’s fans.” Jamie had medical issues, so when the season was coming up, I wrote her a response and said, “If you concentrate on getting better, we’ll name a character after you.” And she responded and said, “That’s amazing, but can you just do me a favor? Can you make sure it’s a character that doesn’t die?” So the female lead in this one we named Jamie. That was one of the only times we ever named a character after a real person and a fan. The happy ending is she was thrilled and she grew up healthy and now tours around with a replica of the Impala.
ACKLES: Jamie was one of my favorite Dean Girls. Melinda was so good and so fun.
From the instant the episode began, fans knew they were in for something special as the old black-and-white WB logo kicked off a very old-school credits sequence.
SINGER: Right from the opening of the Warner Brothers shield, you know where you’re going. It set the tone perfectly.
KRIPKE: That and “Changing Channels” are the only two episodes where I’ll sit down and just watch the credit sequence. The font, the way you list every crew member, and it just goes on forever. And [composer Christopher] Lennertz wrote real orchestral music for it. I just love the opening of that episode and the way we did that title sequence. But changing subjects, what that reminds me of is the singular genius of Ben Edlund to set this episode during Oktoberfest. Suddenly everyone looks like European villagers and everything becomes a real monster movie.
SINGER: And that location was a party site, but it worked perfect for us.
PADALECKI: It was like an amusement park in the outskirts of Vancouver that we rented out. It ended up unfortunately getting torn down and turned into condos or something.
THE MIDDLE
With the setting and the cast locked, the brothers set out on their hunt, arriving at Oktoberfest to help solve a murder. And when the investigation made Dean late to his first date with Jamie, he found himself face-to-face with Dracula. So naturally, Dean punched the shapeshifter in the face. A fight ensued, one that ended with Dean holding an ear and Dracula ... riding a vespa?
ACKLES: I believe one of the many reasons this show lasted as long as it did is because it can be scary but then at the same time, you throw something like the scooter in and it layers in comedy with horror, with drama, with romance. It touches it all. Bob said it early on and it became a mantra of ours: “No joke is too cheap.”
STASHWICK: That’s the infamous assault scene. I’m in full crazy mode and I’m supposed to clock Jensen in his beautiful face with my elbow, and for whatever reason in that moment — I perhaps leaned in, he perhaps leaned in — we closed that gap and I clocked him. So what you see on the DVD extras is me being all Dracula and then me being mortified that I just hit their billion dollar baby in the face.
ACKLES: He caught me with an elbow but he probably thought he hit me harder than he did. It was a mix between a good shot and a graze, but he immediately broke character. He was like, “Are you good?” And I was like, “Yeah, that one woke me up.” [Laughs]
Dean made it through that fight, but the shapeshifter had already planned its next move: While Sam checked out an eccentric local that they thought was the killer, Dean and Jamie shared a drink back at the bar where she worked. Her friend Lucy (Holly Elissa) then showed up just in time to spike their drinks. By the time Dean woke up, he was wearing Lederhosen while strapped to a table in a dungeon.
SINGER: Jensen was like, “Oh god do I have to wear this?” So to make him feel better, I put on the Lederhosen top. I didn’t go with the full shorts but I did direct that day in the Lederhosen top to take the edge off it a little bit for him.
ACKLES: I remember that! He directed in that shirt. [Laughs] Those were authentic leather Lederhosen from Bavaria. Only the best for Dean.
PADALECKI: When Jensen’s first getting strapped to the table, cause he’s a big guy, I remember them talking about how for the visual's sake, they wanted it to be like he’s a quote-unquote damsel in distress, so if they used a normal-sized platform, it would’ve looked comical, but not in a good way. So they had to make it a little bigger cause he’s kind of big.
Dean wasn’t in the dungeon long before Dracula left him to go answer the doorbell. It seemed the shapeshifter ordered a pizza … and he had a coupon.
KRIPKE: I just love how there’s the monster lab in the basement but then you go upstairs and it’s this mid-century ranch house. That’s almost a direct ripoff of the Steve Martin movie The Man with Two Brains.
SINGER: [Set designer] Jerry [Wanek] did a great job in building the dungeon set, and then when the doorbell rings, you realize it’s in the bottom of a suburban house with a pizza guy showing up at the door.
KRIPKE: When Ben wrote the script, we talked about that scene more than any other scene in the episode. We were so specific about how we wanted the Dracula shapeshifter to react to the pizza guy and the way he’s scared when he says, “Is there garlic on the pizza?” And then the way the pizza guy’s so bored and over it: “Did you order garlic?” And then he says, “No!” It’s the way that he’s so bored of this Dracula at the door.
PADALECKI: I think Jensen and I must’ve watched this episode together in 2008 because I remember us looking at each other and going like, ”Oh my god, [the pizza guy] is way better than he needs to be!”
ACKLES: That line, because of the way that Todd delivered it, we used that line on set many, many times. Whenever somebody asked a question that had an obvious “no” to it, it’d be like, “Hey, did you want the big light on in the distance?” And Bob would be like, “Is there garlic on it?” So that became a little ism on set.
STASHWICK: I’m a Second City guy, so “yes, and” is drilled into my head and yet the two memes I’m most known for, I’m saying the word “no,” and that is Supernatural and Star Trek. I have the no's that are heard around the world.
In the end, the brothers came out victorious and another monster was dead, but not before this one made you feel a little something (and gave one heck of a final monologue quoting King Kong).
KRIPKE: Ben gets all the credit, and rightfully so, for writing the crazy episodes, but where I don’t think he gets enough credit is what a disciplined screenwriter he is in terms of character consistency and rule consistency and just the emotion and pathos he brings to every single story he does. No matter how crazy, he always has such a talent for capturing humanity. I wasn’t counting on the shapeshifter to have pathos but when he gives that speech at the end, it’s so sad. I give him all the credit in the world for that.
SINGER: Eric used to say, “Every villain is a hero of his own story,” so we always tried, as best we could, to give the villains something to do and learn more about them and give them full characters. So even with all this fun, we managed to give him something a little more to do.
PADALECKI: He becomes an almost sympathetic character — I stress almost because he did kill a couple people — but what a great character arc all inside of one episode.
STASHWICK: Because this character wasn’t just a cartoon Dracula and he had that human moment, I think it made him stick in people’s minds more. This monster just really loved the movies. He was the ultimate cosplayer. It might be the thing I’m most known for outside of Star Trek, that one episode of TV.
THE END...?
Although Dracula didn’t make it out alive, the episode seemed to breathe new life into the series, marking perhaps its biggest risk yet, though not the biggest risk the show would ever take.
SINGER: It kind of laid a template for other big swings that we took that were out of the ordinary, whether it was “Changing Channels” or “The French Mistake.” This was the first of our big swings of being totally different than what the show was generally week to week.
KRIPKE: I remember it getting a positive reception. I think people appreciated the swings we were starting to take. I just love that this small little supernatural show that’s arguably a Buffy ripoff on The CW got so experimental. I am really proud that we were doing legit avant-garde stuff, really experimental filmmaking, of which this was one, and then we just kept pushing it.
PADALECKI: It’s such a great episode of television and I think we have a few in our 15 years that could stand alone as something fun to watch and out of the box, and it's certainly easy to argue "Monster Movie" is at the top.
ACKLES: This was really when we were hitting our stride. We were in the pocket with these characters, with the storytelling, with the writing. The first year was really finding our feet, the second was like, "Okay we somehow survived a network merge, let’s not mess this up." And then third season we started playing a little bit. So by the fourth season, we’re like, "Now we know where we need to be." This was the perfect time to do one of these outside-the-box episodes. This is definitely one of my top 10.
SINGER: I directed 48 episodes and if somebody asked me which is my favorite, I would probably say this one. I just had the best time doing it.
