‘Supernatural:’ A little horror movie every week

It isn’t going to be a very good fall for mommies on new sci-fi shows. ABC’s “Invasion” has one “smelling different,” probably due to proximity to aliens, and on the WB’s “Supernatural” there’s a mother pinned to the ceiling above her child’s crib, engulfed by hellfire.

“Supernatural” uses the image to establish its horror-movie bona fides, to elicit waves of disturbance and pleasure in said disturbance. Network TV is clear on certain issues of sexual content (you can’t show a nipple, we know that), but there’s more ambiguity around horror-movie violence. Can you show a woman pinned to the ceiling like that? “Supernatural” looks like it’ll push things; that introductory scene is certainly a “gotcha” moment promising more.

The show has a quorum of executive producers around it with Hollywood box-office credibility, including Eric Kripke, whose screenwriting credits include “The Grudge” and “Boogeyman,” and music video auteur turned filmmaker McG (“Charlie’s Angels”). McG knows loud. “Supernatural” is a loud, believably unbelievable ghost story, a different ghost from classic lore guest-starring each week. Bloody Mary. The man with a hook who haunts Lovers Lane.

To untangle our protagonists: When the Winchester boys, Dean (Jensen Ackles) and Sam (Jared Padalecki) were little, the boogeyman (unspecified) came to get their mother (aforementioned, on ceiling). The event sent the boys’ father (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) on a lifelong, obsessive quest (is there any other kind on TV?) to find the evil spirit that perpetrated the episode. Now he’s missing on a “hunting trip,” and all-grown-up Dean enlists about-to-enter-Stanford-law-school Sam on a mission to find him.

The brothers, as characters, are neatly divided into the renegade, Dean, and the reluctant, sensitive renegade, Sam. The way we know they’re brothers is that they punch each other a lot, and when Sam complains about Dean’s driving music, a collection of heavy metal tapes, Dean says: “Driver picks the music, shotgun shuts his cake hole.”

Between brothers, that tears an argument. As much as it is a ghost story, and a “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” descendant, “Supernatural” is also a road movie, the brothers tooling back-country roads in Dean’s ’67 Chevy.

Their first stop is a town called Jericho, Calif., where they have goth chicks and a library. While visiting, Dean and Sam catch the scent of their father and confront the Lady in White, a dead hitchhiker who picks up rides from horny guys and then offs them.

It’s a horror-movie convention -- foreplay followed by gruesome death -- and the makers of “Supernatural” are smart to kick things off this way, smart to signal that they will be aping evergreen moments of the horror genre.

Because this establishes the show as a little horror movie each week. “Supernatural” isn’t breaking any ground (it’s treading all over already tread ground, in fact), but it has all of its linear ducks in a row, the Pavlovian scare tactics and the rugged-cute guy leads and the cartoon themes. It’s like a show raised not by wolves but by the WB

It’s a splashy debut, but the show seems to lack the relationships at its center that made “Buffy,” for instance, fun. This, by contrast, is soundly engineered. The rest just scares itself.

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‘Supernatural’

Where: WB

When: 9 to 10:07 p.m. (premiere only)

Ratings: TV-14. May be unsuitable for children younger than 14, with strong advisories for language, violence and dialogue

Jared Padalecki...Sam Winchester

Jensen Ackles...Dean Winchester

Executive producers: McG, Eric Kripke, Robert Singer. Writer: Eric Kripke.