INTERVIEW: New Hulu series travels ‘Out There’ into the realm of true crime
Photo: Out There: Crimes of the Paranormal is now streaming on Hulu. Photo courtesy of Hulu / Provided by press site.
Out There: Crimes of the Paranormal, produced by the Duplass Brothers, is a new Hulu series that investigates a variety of stories where the paranormal comes into play when trying to figure out what happened. One can look at the tales being told through a law-enforcement lens, envisioning the case as a purely criminal situation, but there are others associated with the story who also bring in a paranormal element, asking questions about cryptids and other creatures the may be to blame. Ultimately, one’s personal belief system will drive their willingness to accept these arguments from “out there.”
Alexandra Orton is the showrunner of the series, leading the creative team for each of the eight episodes, which are now streaming on Hulu. One segment uncovers details about an alleged UFO crash landing on Long Island, New York. Another episode delves deep into the lore of a hairy “wildman” in the Smoky Mountains. Still another focuses on the “Pope Lick Goatman” in Kentucky.
“Definitely growing up I was a huge fan of The X Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer and all of those shows,” Orton said in a recent Zoom interview. “I think that it would be very foolish to assume that everything about the world that there is to know is known to us. There’s so much we don’t know about the ocean, about what’s in the woods, about what happens after we die, and so it’s really natural to have these kinds of questions and dive into whether it’s things like UFOs or mythic creatures or folklore.”
Orton said her interest in the strange and unusual came to her at a young age, but as a documentarian, she hasn’t had too many chances to explore this fascination of hers. So she jumped at the chance to help produce these eight episodes of Out There.
“I was very eager to try to do something a little bit new, and I think that ultimately all documentaries are about trying to understand people and why they believe what they believe,” she said. “And [I’m] assuming that in their brains that they are making the best, most wise and rational decisions they can with the information they’ve got, and I think that this series is no different. And that’s why it speaks to so many universal themes for people when they watch.”
What sets Out There apart from other paranormal programming on television is this interesting cross-section of true crime and the supernatural. Orton said she believes this is what has been driving viewers to check out the series because there aren’t too many shows that combine both worlds into one narrative.
“Hopefully that means that you can be a person who normally watches true crime, and you can come and think, oh, I’m learning totally new things,” Orton said. “And you can be a person who comes from a paranormal show background, and you can go, wow, I never thought about the context of these stories. I think the other ace up our sleeves is that these are all very specific stories where you get to meet people, and you understand them with very intimate access. So instead of the news-magazine format where it’s like I’m going to broadly tell you this story through a bunch of journalists, but you’re not going to meet the people it happened to, for this, the first person you meet is always a person that this happened to and a person with stakes in the story. And you never leave them. You’re with them the whole way through the story, and I think that’s really our secret weapon.”
One of the saddest and most dramatic episodes involves the death of a teenage girl in the woods of New Jersey. This is an infamous true-crime case in the Garden State, and Orton’s team was interested because of the many “out there” explanations that have been given about what happened to Jeannette DePalma.
“It was one of the last episodes we developed,” she said. “In 1972, in Springfield, New Jersey, a 16-year-old girl, Jeannette DePalma, went missing, and she was missing for about six weeks. And then eventually a dog brought home an arm to its owner, part of an arm, and the cops arrived to try to figure out where the body was connected to this arm and ended up finding her decomposing body at the top of this cliff overlooking a quarry. And nobody knew what happened to her, but almost immediately newspapers started reporting that some [people] had said that it was witches, that she was killed in a Satanic witch ritual at the quarry and that there were upside crosses and altar paraphernalia around the body. And this just gripped people. People really genuinely were worried about witches killing their kids.”
Out There looks at several possible explanations for DePalma’s death, with the team constantly asking questions and trying to figure out what exactly happened 50 years ago near that quarry.
“One of the things I think we found so interesting is a lot of supernatural stories are sort of male-centric, and this one is very much about a young girl who goes missing,” she said. “It says a lot of interesting things about religion, about how we feel about women in this moment in the ‘70s coming off the heels of the hippie counterculture and into the Jesus revolution, and … the early days of the Satanic Panic weaves in and out of all these different things.”
Some viewers may watch Out There and be intrigued but not buy any of the paranormal explanations. They may simply say these eyewitnesses are mistaken, and an actual true crime took place — caused by a human, not a creature, caused by a real monster, not a legendary one. Orton welcomes all beliefs to the investigative series.
“You have to take it case by case,” the showrunner said. “I think people are raised or exposed to certain beliefs, and they embrace them and they believe them absolutely. And they are living in this world that you or I might not be familiar with it, but they are seeing the world entirely through the lens of those beliefs. So I don’t know if you could say that they’re lying. According to them, this is the world they live in, and they are trying to make the most rational, smart decisions they can in their life with the information they’ve been given, and so that’s why I think with each of these stories, we don’t tell you what to believe. But we try as hard as possible to give you the context of the story. That may sound wild to us, those kinds of things, but on the flip side, I’m sure if we reflect we can all find things in ourselves where we are unquestioningly working in a world where we believe something we can’t prove, something we don’t know for sure is true. But we’re living our entire lives assuming that we’re right.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Out There: Crimes of the Paranormal is now streaming on Hulu. Click here for more information.
