This week’s Supernatural was a loving homage to the classic Universal Studios monster movies, complete with a bombastic soundtrack in the place of Supernatural’s classic rock and a full black-and-white episode.

A full unpacking of the expert genre and medium emulation on the part of the episode “Monster Movie” would fill an entire journal-length essay, which I intend to write, but not here.

The episode “Monster Movie” was written by Ben The Tick and Angel‘s “Smile Time” Edlund, a devotee of classic horror and expert in loving parody. The entire episode had its medium and genre conventions filtered through the Universal Studios Monster Movie paradigm.

But the genre elements were explicitly diegetic (internal) as well as influencing the credits, the color (as in none), and even including an intermission card in the middle of the episode before a commerical break. Sam and Dead listen to and comment on the horror-movie ‘radio’ which gives the soundtrack.

Throughout the episode, Sam and Dean are confused, then bemused by the fact that the popular, media versions of classic monsters such as Bela Lugosi’s Dracula, the Wolfman, and the Mummy pop up to commit murders across a Pennsylvania town during Oktoberfest (having the whole town dressed up Oktoberfest-style means that various locals can all be dressed up in a way that invokes the original Dracula, including Dean’s romantic interest of the week, a bartender aka “bar wench” named Jaime.

The reason for this genre emulation goes into the plot of the episode itself, rather than being just mapped on to an otherwise ‘normal’ Supernatural case. In a move consistent with Universal monster movies, the villain is made sympathetic in its monologue about being feared and reviled, then finding solace in the noble solitude of the “classic monsters” of film.

The shapeshifter villain is trapped in the genre conventions of the monsters he emulates, down to oh-so-slowly reaching for the switch that would electrocute Dean, explicitly casting our heroes and others into the Dracula story (Dean as Jonathan Harker, Sam as Abraham Van Helsing, with Dean’s romantic interest Jaime as Mina Murray).

In a genre-inverting turn, it is our damsel in distress who vanquishes the monster (with silver, which does not normally kill vampires in Supernatural‘s mythology) working both as an inversion of genre expectations as well as the expectation for Supernatural itself, which has been criticized for its treatment of women.

This level of genre emulation and careful parody happens from time to time in television and film, and “Monster Movie” provides more evidence that the best parodies come from a deep understanding and appreciation for the genre being parodied. One of the best examples of this mode of parody can be seen in the ABC Family show The Middleman, adapted from a graphic novel series into a tv superhero parody tour-de-force of Generation X/Y (mostly geek) cultural references.