Episode Details

A strange thing happened in 2019. A five-part paranormal documentary series named after a small town in Kentucky was released for free on the internet. The promo art for the series featured a bizarre humanoid figure with a conical head and amphibious features and felt like clear counterprogramming to the run-of-the-mill ghost-harassing fodder dominating mainstream TV at the time. The project was helmed by first-time director Karl Pfeiffer, and the documentary focused on the chummy husband-and-wife paranormal investigation duo, Greg and Dana Newkirk. Up until this point, Greg and Dana were known primarily as ghost hunters, and their approach to branding could best be described as the intersection of the anomalous and fart jokes. This new documentary, Hellier, felt very different. As a pretentious snob, at the time, I would have called myself a Fortean. I was less interested in ghost-hunting shows and Ancient Aliens than I was in pondering the novel theories of Jacques Vallee and Terrence McKenna and their implications for what we might call the paranormal.

Even though I was skeptical of Hellier initially, it was free after all, and I dove right in. Much like the Newkirk's themselves, I was shocked to discover that what was ostensibly going to be a quirky investigation of a purported goblin sighting soon became a deeply engrossing meditation on the amorphous nature of paranormal activity, and the implications of the phenomena, once glimpsed, staring back wryly. Credit to the team behind Hellier, as the narrative they encountered became weirder, so did their approach to the investigation. It's clear that John Keel and his heterodoxical embrace of so-called "high strangeness" in considering the realm of the paranormal became an intentional road map for the Newkirks to follow, but maybe less obvious to them was the way in which their goblin hunting movie was also becoming infected by a mysterious, co-creative trickster energy, more akin to Robert Anton Wilson's 1977 narrative non-fiction ordeal Cosmic Trigger. Playboy writer turned ironic cult leader, Robert Anton Wilson, through documenting his own psychedelic and synchromystical experiences with skillful levity and wit, fomented an occult revolution. Although Wilson was clearly a product of the late sixties hippie generation, his novel approach to the subject of the anomalous and esoteric planted a seed in the budding young weirdos of the next generation, becoming something of a patron saint for the chaos magicians and psychonauts that would carry the occult revival torch for the cyber punks and archaic revivalists of Generation X. By the time Hellier was released in 2019, Cosmic Trigger's influence had wained, and a new generation, unaware that all the structures holding together consensus reality were about to crumble around them, were ripe for an initiatory artifact of their own. To my estimation, Hellier became a new participant in the initiatory current that propelled Cosmic Trigger to infamy, but updated for the internet generation, and made bingeable.

There's a cathartic moment early in Hellier's second season where the floor drops out from under the premise of the series, and the creators sit down to recount the flurry of messages, warnings, and clues they received after the show first premiered. These messages weren't from their target ghost-hunting demographic, but a swarm of online occultists, who in an uncoordinated effort had reached out in droves to explain the hidden premise of their own show to them. Hellier, the series, the project, it was suggested, is a ritual, and an initiation is being unknowingly undertaken not only by the show's creators, but by its audience as well.

Season 2 of Hellier premiered a few months before a worldwide lockdown, spurred on by the Covid-19 pandemic, would cause a large swath of the world who would normally be distracted by the mundane toils of daily life to be sucked