One night I was putting my then four-year-old daughter Alexandra to bed. As I was tucking her in, she looked up at me with the kind of sweet, innocent eyes that belong to four-year-old girls and said, “Daddy, tell me a scary story.” There is something deeply ingrained within us that seeks out the frightening amidst the comfortable, the bizarre amidst the normal, and the Supernatural amidst the natural. Is that not why children love fairy tales? I’m not talking about the sanitized fairy tales we force-feed children today in which the three little pigs reconcile their differences with the big bad wolf. I’m talking about the original fairy tales in the Brothers Grimm tradition-fairy tales in which people’s eyes get poked out, grandmothers get eaten by wolves, and fee-fi-fo-fumming giants meet a grisly end. Real fairy tales are dark stories that tap into that part of us that finds a strange form of comfort in the encounter with things that frighten us. What could be scarier than to be lost in a strange wood only to come upon a kindly old lady in a candy house? The promise of sweets quickly turns sour as you find yourself locked in a cage and staring at an oven, knowing that it’s not a Honey Baked Ham the old lady is planning to slide in there. My mother read that story to me as a child. It was terrifying … and I loved it!

That’s the reason I began to watch Supernatural. I  …