Your Ghost Show Sucks

Thank god this weekend witnesses the return of The Dead Files, one of the few remaining Reality TV paranormal ghost hunting shows that doesn't irritate the fuck out of me. Yes, ghost hunting shows are my weakness. And before you judge me, know this: I have never seen a single episode of Honey Boo Boo, Sister Wives or anything starring anyone whose surname is Kardashian. So eat me, I will watch my ghost hunting shows with a clear conscience.

And I watch every single ghost hunting show that pops up. I'm like a necrophiliac at an eighty car interstate pile up: I can't not look. Got a ghost show? I got a lady boner. Gimme! Bust out those EVPs and MelMeters and full spectrum cameras and show me the good stuff, baby. I'll rub one out right on your cold spot and still take every last inch of your EM Pump.

But sadly, many of my long standing relationships with ghost hunting shows have soured. I live about a twenty minute drive away from the TAPS headquarters and I don't care. I used to be the biggest, gooberiest, most devoted fan of Ghost Hunters for roughly the first seven seasons, and then...I don't know, I just woke up one morning and realized it was over. It was the accumulation of little things over the years: Jason's assholishness, Steve's smugness, Dustin's hair, Brian Harnois' face. For a while I glommed onto GHI (Ghost Hunters International) but even though Barry Fitzgerald remains the only likable investigator left on the ever changing team, interest simply waned. The day that Jay and Grant went snowmobiling off into the great unknown, leaving the rest of the crew behind to investigate their newly purchased bed and breakfast, I checked out. I just didn't care anymore. It was time to move on.

That's right, look ashamed.

For a while (several years, in fact) Ghost Adventures served as an enthusiastic replacement for the tired TAPS crew. The GA team were young, rude and eager. Zak the alpha male, Aaron the goofball, Nick the sensitive one. Their exuberance was infectious and fun, they didn't take themselves too seriously, they were just three dorks with night vision cameras, poking the darkness with a stick. But then... okay, I'll admit that something inside of me curled up and died when I found out that Zak was dating Christine Dolce aka "ForBiddeN." Not because I wanted him for myself - he always seemed too Popped Collar Douchey to take seriously - but because "ForBiddeN" seems so...scorbutic? Is that the word I want? Then Zak's initial douchiness - which seemed harmless at first - started getting bigger than his biceps. Suddenly, Vince Neil was on the show and I was recoiling, wondering how the hell they could differentiate between an EVP and the sounds of millions of pubic lice rubbing their forearms together in the crotch of Neil's pants. The sharper Zak's hair got, the smaller his brain became. Where once he had been respectful of the dead, he was now a full blown ghost whore. A religious leader of the community tells him not to provoke the dead or be disrespectful of their resting place(s)? Yeah. Wait until that person turns their back and cue Zak, spinning his camera around for his close-up: *doodly-doodly-doop* "Okay guys, we're gonna provoke the dead and/or be disrespectful of their resting place(s)! TONIGHT!" *insert frat boy whoop here*

Look, this show isn't supposed to be about you, or your hair, or your sky high testosterone levels. It's supposed to be about life after death and any evidence which may or may not prove its existence. Okay? Yeesh. Your mothers ought to smack your faces.

And now here come The Demon Files, starring Ralph Sarchie, retired NYPD with the Noo Yawk accent and the fuggedabowtid 'tude, callin' out the demons like the fawkin' mooks dey aah. Sadly, Ralph is not played by Eric Bana this time around. Sarchie, a devout Catholic (or Catlick, if we want to stick with the New York theme) doesn't believe in ghosts. In Catholic ideology, there are no ghosts, only angels and demons. Dead people either go to Heaven or Hell; they don't hang around on this plane. If you gotta problem in your house - if you're hearing knocks or getting scratched or hearing voices in the dead of night - you got demons. Period. And there's only one kind of demon in Sarchie's world: Satanic ones.

I got about halfway through the pilot episode and shut it off in disgust. I didn't like Sarchie's approach, which in his own words is coming in and "giving the finger" to the devil. Hey man, if you want to do that in your own house, fine. But going in and talking shit to already cranky ethereal beings is like having an exterminator come into your home to deal with the cockroach infestation, and instead of spraying insecticide, the asshole smears sheet cake all over the walls and varnishes the floors with maple syrup. And then he leaves. And you're stuck with the mess. And the roaches, who are now having super cosmic funky boogie down block orgies in every room of your home, laughing while they reproduce, build condos in your dirty panties and eat your pets.

This poster hangs in my house. Never been possessed. Not even once.

The moment I turned the show off was the moment that Sarchie asked - in a very interrogative manner - a clearly frightened teenage girl if she'd given herself to Satan. What?! Just...WHAT?! Wait, she hung an anarchy symbol on her wall so she's in league with the devil? Seriously? Dude, I have a Guy Fawkes mask hanging on my bedroom wall, does that mean I'm blowing Beelzebub? I also have a full sized poster of Kjetil Haraldstad in full corpse paint on another wall, does that mean I've basically sent out an Open House invite to the Prince Of Darkness to perform invasive anal on me in my sleep? Ohmygod I collect skulls - I'm practically asking to be gang banged by a herd of bipedal porno porky swine men with seventeen inch cocks that spew lava. Get a grip man, it's 2015. And the Torquemada Technique went the way of dinosaur sometime ago. I know you're bound by your faith to accept and believe a pre-determined set of guidelines, but the simple fact of the matter is: you don't know for certain. You are assuming that every infestation is a demonic one, in which case may I suggest that you buddy up with Lorraine Warren? But you don't know for sure that the souls of dead people don't hang around after the body wears out. God gave us free will - pretty sure that agreement doesn't expire simply because the vehicle has gone kaput. To summarize: lighten up, ya mook.

So yeah, I'll stick with The Dead Files, with foul-mouthed Amy and her crazy face, and Steve with his doggie head tilts and mispronunciation of "liberry." No EVPs, no Ovilus, nothing but Amy's impressions and a police sketch artist. Maybe it's all bullshit, but the forthright manner in which the evidence is presented is never embellished, garishly spotlit or jazzed up with special effects. Very, very few famously haunted places are ever investigated, because Amy doesn't approve of whoring the dead. She empathizes with Lizzie Borden and slammed that cocky fuckloaf who turned Wolfe Manor into a paranormal petting zoo, putting the memories of the tormented and insane dead on display for the enjoyment of the living. Shows like The Demon Files remind me of those assholes who go to zoos and shoot the lions and tigers with rocks launched from slingshots and then have the nerve to be shocked when the goddamned righteously pissed off animal lunges out of its enclosure and eats their fucking face off.

Seriously, how would you like it if a group of douchey tools barged into your house in the middle of the night and started asking you stupid questions and filming you? And why is it any less rude when you're dead?