Resident Evil showrunner Andrew Dabb is no stranger to dealing with monsters. The producer and writer worked on the monster-hunting sibling drama Supernatural for more than a decade, co-running the series in its final four seasons. And while both Resident Evil and Supernatural are adventure series with spooky creatures, they share another very important trait in common: they’re both about family.
In Resident Evil, fraternal twins Jade and Billie Wesker team up to uncover dark secrets at their father’s company that lead to some far-reaching consequences. In Supernatural, Winchester brothers Sam and Dean join forces to travel the country and take down ghosts, monsters, demons and other supernatural phenomena.
“Every good story is a family story in one way or another,” Dabb tells Tudum about the similarities between the two shows.
In fact, Dabb says that there’s one episode of Supernatural in particular that will give viewers an idea of what to expect from his adaptation Resident Evil, which follows storylines in both 2022 and 2036. In the fourth episode of Season 5, “The End,” “Dean gets zapped into the post-apocalyptic future,” Dabb says. “The world has changed, but the question is how?”
“Basically,” Dabb continues, “you’re meeting these characters when they're very young, and [then] you're catching up with them 16 years later. How do they change? How do they grow? How do they evolve?”
That episode is a microcosm of Resident Evil’s structure, and the macrocosm is the series arc of Supernatural’s 15-season run. Below, Dabb reflects on the most memorable episodes of Supernatural that he wrote, and how his time working on the series helped shape his new show.
Season 4, Episode 6, “Yellow Fever”
This episode is a take on the “woman in white” horror trope and is inspired by a trip Dabb took to Zanzibar with his father, where he picked up a local author’s book of ghost stories. “Because that was my first episode, it’s very vivid in my mind,” Dabb says. “It was a really interesting introduction because, by Season 4 of the show, the guys build the characters really well. There's a moment after the episode where Jensen [Ackles] as Dean lip-synchs ‘Eye of the Tiger’ in a very funny way. Obviously that was all him. He just did it. As a new writer, I’m like, ‘Oh, these guys are awesome and they can take what you give them and elevate them,’ which I think certainly proved true over my 12 years on the show.”
Season 6, Episode 4, “Weekend at Bobby’s”
This entry focused entirely on Jim Beaver’s veteran hunter Bobby, was one of Dabb’s favorites to write. “When I started, there was serious debate about having scenes that weren’t people getting killed without the guys in them. I mean, Jared [Padalecki] and Jensen were working every day, all day,” Dabb says. “So to be able to break that mold and go explore the Bobby thing was really, really fun. And I think it's probably one of the best episodes I wrote.”
Season 8, Episode 8, “Hunteri Heroici”
While Dabb wrote the previous episodes with his writing partner Daniel Loflin, this Season 8 episode was his first solo outing after four years on the show. Here, the brothers’ pal Castiel tries his hand at demon hunting and investigates a series of murders caused by “cartoon logic.” “It was one of the first episodes I’ve been involved in that really pushed the special effects a little further than we would normally go, and in directions we wouldn’t normally go,” Dabb says. “We did a lot of black eyes and demon smoke and blood and things like that, but this put in animation and people falling off buildings and all that stuff. It really showed me what our special effects department could do — probably in a bad way, because by the end we were running them ragged. Really, they were just too good. That’s their fault.”
Season 9, Episode 10, “Road Trip”
While Resident Evil’s two storylines show how some of the characters have changed throughout the years, this mid-run Supernatural episode reveals the ways the Winchester brothers and their closest confidants had transformed in the show’s nine seasons. “As the show grows and the characters evolve, they have to evolve in a direction. Sam and Dean, if you look at them in Season 1 and you look at them by the end, they’ve evolved quite a bit,” Dabb says. “They’ve made peace with a lot of their demons. They’re much more functional. This episode, because it puts all of [the characters] together, was really an interesting opportunity to explore that.”
Season 15, Episode 20, “Carry On”
This might have been the series finale, but according to Dabb, “Supernatural doesn’t really end.” Give it five years, he jokes, and the brothers could be back in their Impala. But the finale ended with a sacrifice that, Dabb says, “always felt like where the story was going for a lot of years.” The catharsis of seeing this story wrap up made Dabb cry after watching the first cut. “It was nerve-racking to write, but a real privilege and something that I am very proud of.”
