Hellier: Here be Gerblins

We watched Hellier for research purposes while sequestered at Emily Tesh’s writing retreat and it certainly was a show that we watched.

To quote the IMDB page:

A small crew of paranormal researchers find themselves in a dying coal town, where a series of strange coincidences leads them to a decades-old mystery with far-reaching implications.

While the documentary does follow a team of paranormal researchers to a dying coal town, the rest of the description is complete and total bullshit. What actually happens is:

• A researcher receives some emails from a guy claiming gerblins are dicking around his house somewhere around the Appalachian town of Hellier. They’re all peering in his windows and stealing his children’s toys and he has some blurry pictures as proof. One shows some three-toed footprints, one shows an apparently incredibly suggestive white blur. Could be a snowy owl, could be some grease on the lens, OR it would be the bald dome of an extraterrestrial goblin man. Equal odds.
• The crew go into excruciating detail on how they all know each other and their relevant paranormal qualifications.
• They go to Hellier and conclude that the locals not being very interested in talking to them or having many tales of the paranormal to share is proof that there is something extra paranormal happening.
• They sit on a porch, do what’s essentially advanced Ouija, and yell at some bushes that might have a coyote or something in.
• They go to an abandoned mine and see a tin can. For extremely convoluted reasons, they conclude the tin can is literally or metaphorically an alien.
• Mission….accomplished…..?

Did we mention that this takes six hour-long episodes to cover? It’s not clear who the bigger saps are, the ones who take incredibly expensive video gear into an abandoned train tunnel to shout at bats for four hours about high strangeness and Indrid Cold (who might be an alien, might be a black man, might be both, this isn’t even something they made up, this is actual paranormal lore) or us, for watching six hours of it.

Just kidding, it’s definitely them.

Four grown adults with video editing skills go deep into the heart of Appalachia, where communities have been rocked by decades of poverty, addiction, and the brutal economy of mining, bother the locals, and their takeaway is ‘okay, the goblins definitely could have used the cave systems to get between Kentucky and Ohio. Also the Mothman Prophecies said that sometimes Indrid Cold appears as a tin can.’

We never see any goblins.

The thing they heard in the train tunnel was definitely a bat.

And we’re absolutely watching Season 2 when it comes out in November.