Playing Soccer with Aliens: Hellier Reviewed 

The highest compliment I can give Hellier – a five-part paranormal documentary available for free at Hellier.tv – is that it completely ruined my weekend. After I watched the first episode late last Friday night, I knew the detailed to-do list I had written for Saturday was no longer operable. Grocery shopping, errands, and catching up on some work for my day job would all have to wait. I was entering Binge Territory, and there was nothing I could do to stop it.

Hellier chronicles the exploits of a small crew of paranormal investigators (led by Greg and Dana Newkirk of Planet Weird fame) as they follow up on strange reports of goblin-like aliens terrorizing a family in rural Kentucky. However, the investigation is anything but straightforward. A series of bizarre coincidences and elaborate deceptions (of both the human and paranormal kind) lure the crew down a zigzag trail that keeps them guessing and running into dead ends, both literally and figuratively.

They realize early on that someone – or some thing – is pulling their chain, but are willing to hang in there anyway. Their attitude is refreshing: they’re self-aware and clear-eyed enough to know they’re being jerked around and probably won’t find the answers they’re looking for, but decide it’s worth continuing for the experience alone, and whatever small pieces of information or insight they can glean along the way. They’re playing the long game.

By the end of the series, they’ve encountered nearly everything in the paranormal grab bag: ghosts, Bigfoot, underground cave systems, classic UFO lore and – looming over the entire documentary like a giant phantom bird – the unsolved mystery of West Virginia’s Mothman and the enduring legacy of paranormal journalist John Keel.

When a TV show like Hellier sets its hooks in you, the feeling is both pleasurable and uncomfortable. There’s a sense of inevitability, like when you reach the top of a rollercoaster ride and rapidly begin to accelerate down the other side. Physics takes over. You can’t stop what’s about to happen, even if you want to. So after I watched the first hour-long episode with its hypnotic pacing and soundtrack, I was feeling both giddy and a little bit apprehensive. I knew I was about to hop on the rollercoaster and ride Hellier all the way down. But I also knew that after it was over, half my weekend would be gone, and that to-do list would be looming even larger in front of me. Plus, my strict Baptist upbringing would make me feel guilty for watching four-plus hours of TV straight through (“You wasted away the whole day,” I could hear my mother saying disapprovingly). Yes, there was no way to escape the Binge Hangover, I solemnly concluded. But I clicked “play” anyway.

Sorry, mom.

Anatomy of a Binge Doc

Hellier was the first documentary series I ever binged. Up until then, I had only gorged on TV shows on Netflix and Amazon Prime – Mindhunters, Supernatural, Stranger Things, etc. These episodic dramas have a number of ways to lure you in, like likeable characters, fast-paced plots and great special effects. But Hellier had a much tougher row to hoe. By its very nature, it’s setting out to tell a true story, so the filmmakers can’t take the easy way out and hook you with a well-crafted plot twist or attack from a CGI monster. It has to stay true to the facts on the ground. And, well, it’s a documentary, with real people instead of trained actors.

So how did the Newkirks create a binge-worthy documentary? First and foremost, the entire series – from the opening credits to the cinematography and editing – looks fabulous. It’s cinematic in the best sense of the word. Nothing grabs a viewer like quality production. Even if they’re not aware of the high level of craft, it hits them subliminally and demands their attention. This was not a slapdash documentary; you can tell early on that every frame has been carefully thought-out, debated and sweated over.

Hellier was self-produced and self-financed – an “indie” in every sense of the word – but it really does look as if it was made by a major Hollywood studio. Director/editor Karl Pfeiffer and camera operator Rashad Sisemore deserve a ton of credit. The opening theme by Anthony Cistone and accompanying score, composed by co-producer and cast member Connor James Randall, is also first-rate, but difficult to describe. It’s a cross between Mark Snow’s atmospheric, ambient X-Files work, Johann Johannson’s Sicario score and the soundtrack to a haunted house movie from the 1980s.

Secondly, the cast is imminently likeable – there’s not a bad apple in the bunch. The Newkirks are the kind of couple you wish you could be friends with. They’re intelligent, dedicated to their work, and most importantly they work well together as a team, both personally and professionally; they just “click.” Pfeiffer and co-producer Randall (who also plays an important role as a channeler/medium of sorts) seem like genuinely nice guys, earnest and “all-in” on their paranormal obsession. They seem like the type of people who would stop and help you fix a flat tire on the side of the road during a rainstorm. You want them to succeed on their mission – and that keeps you watching.

Thirdly, the structure of the documentary is fresh and original. For someone like me, who’s watched approximately 4,356 paranormal reality shows over the years – almost all uniformly bad and cheaply produced for a variety of third-tier cable networks – Hellier was a very pleasant surprise. It avoids falling into the traditional narrative arc of the countless “ghost bro” shows, with their ridiculous histrionics and questionable encounters with the unknown (“Dude, I think I totally just saw some ectoplasm, let’s see if the night vision camera caught it!”). Instead, Hellier favors a looser, almost improvisational tone. Yes, the bare-bones structure is essentially the same – an investigative crew gets word of something weird going on and heads out to investigate – but that’s where the similarities end.

The thing that struck me about Hellier – what convinced me I was in for an entirely new experience – was its pacing. This is a documentary series that takes its time. If you’re used to half-hour bursts of cheesy adrenaline like Ghost Adventures, you may start to get a little restless, even bored, with the first episode. But hang in there. Pfeiffer is interested in telling a story, yes, but he also wants to give you a realistic picture of how real paranormal investigations actually work. And he has complete power to do so, because it’s an independent production, with no studio exec looking over his shoulder and telling him to speed things up. Thus, he spends a lot of time on small, seemingly mundane processes: the endless hours in the car, the meticulous research, the drudgery of lugging equipment back and forth between motels, and so forth. There are lots of false starts and frank conversations about what to do (or not do) next.

Most importantly, Pfeiffer shows us Greg Newkirk in action. A lot. When they first arrive in Hellier, they park at a local gas station, and Newkirk begins canvassing everyone who stops by for gas or a beer – he’s essentially a salesman doing the hardest cold calls of his life. “Hey, how’s it goin’? Seen anything weird? Heard anything about goblins?” Newkirk is relentless, but unfailingly polite and professional, even when dealing with people who are, to put it politely, a little sketchy. He has a real knack for getting them – anyone, really – to talk. In a later episode, we see him working his cell phone one morning, making call after call to local and state government agencies, looking for information on the person who first contacted them about the goblins. These scenes are great, because they drive home how much hard work and sheer grit is involved in a real investigation that isn’t bankrolled by the Travel Channel and prepped by a small army of producers and interns.

The decision to show the realities of the team’s job pays off in another way, too. When the “big scenes” of paranormal encounters finally arrive – when it finally gets truly and gloriously scary and weird – the payoff is incredible, because you’ve been waiting so long for it. Hellier is like a soccer game in that respect: it’s long and low-scoring, but when someone does finally make a goal, the excitement is off the charts because of all the built-up anticipation. I won’t give away much more, only to say that the third episode is the crown jewel of the series, showcasing a lengthy channeled “conversation” between the crew and…something. Again, Pfeiffer lets the scene breathe. There are no melodramatic jump-cuts or close-ups. We experience it in near-real time, with the sporadic moments of strangeness juxtaposed with numerous “dead spots” when nothing happens – or when everyone is exhausted and just plain confused. It’s real and it’s human, and it’s the heart of Hellier.

John Keel, Come on Down!

<Author checks word count, realizes he needs to wrap things up>

One more thing and them I’m done.

The other major accomplishment of Hellier, in my opinion, is that it brings to the forefront and effectively “mainstreams” the ideas and philosophy of paranormal journalist John Keel, author of the seminal book The Mothman Prophecies and one of the most controversial figures in twentieth-century UFO culture. It’s difficult to summarize Keel’s outlook in a few sentences, but in a nutshell, he believed in a paranormal “unified field theory.” Traditionally, UFO investigators see their territory as distinct and separate from that of ghost hunters and cryptozoologists (and vice versa). There is little if any communication between the different fields; each exists in its own hermetically sealed silo. But Keel argued that there should be no bright line between UFOs, ghostly phenomena, demons and sightings of strange creatures. In fact, he claimed that despite surface appearances, they are all related and connected – different instruments playing in the same band, so to speak.  

And who’s the bandleader? Keel argued that there is a singular, seemingly malevolent trickster-like intelligence (the “ultraterrestrials”) behind all of these phenomena. But they don’t come from another planet or galaxy. Ultraterrestrials are part of our own world, residing in another phase or dimension of existence that occasionally breaks through into our own daily plane of reality for purposes that remain obscure and perhaps unknowable. Ultraterrestrials seem to delight in frightening and confounding humans by staging “flaps,” periods of intense, highly concentrated paranormal behavior that involve everything but the kitchen sink in terms of phenomena: strange lights in the sky, strange creatures in the woods, strange voices in the dark. The Mothman sightings in Point Pleasant, West Virginia in 1966 was one such flap, and Keel was there for all of it.

But if ultraterrestrials like to screw around with everyday humans, they really enjoy putting paranormal investigators through their paces. Keel was famously frustrated and exasperated at every turn on many of his projects. Ultraterrestrials’ activities are the cartoon equivalent of Lucy pulling away the football every time Charlie Brown runs up to kick it. Every. Single. Time. They have no intention of letting you in on the secret or solving the mystery, but they’ll let you get oh-so-close before throwing everything into chaos and confusion.

The Newkirks & Co. are in many ways Keel’s spiritual children, and Hellier is perhaps the clearest and most convincing example of “Keelianism” ever put on film. We see them experience, in real time, what Keel wrote about – chasing down tantalizing clues, and weathering the crushing sense of defeat when a solid, simple answer fails to materialize. One could argue that the ultraterrestrials deserve their own separate billing in the credits, because in many ways, they’re directing the show.

For decades, Keel’s philosophy was rejected outright by leaders of the various weird sects (UFOs, cryptids, spiritualism, etc.). He developed a cult following over the years, and half the fun in reading Keel was trying to find copies of his books in the pre-Amazon days (I remember almost jumping for joy when I finally found a copy of The Mothman Prophecies at a Tower Records in the mid-1990s). Slowly but surely, though, his ideas began to spread. They are still far from mainstream, but Hellier might just change that.

Conclusion 

Don’t go into Hellier thinking you’re going to get a definite answer to the mystery of whether or not strange alien goblins really terrified a family in rural Kentucky. Newkirk and the others say at several points early on that they know there won’t be a resolution in the classic sense of “It was Colonel Mustard in the drawing room with the kitchen knife.” Instead, the journey is the goal. The connections and discoveries they uncover are oblique and lateral – intriguing and maddening in equal parts, because they stay just hidden enough in the shadows to prevent you from making a definite judgment about what’s actually going on.

So binge Hellier, people. Binge it like there’s no tomorrow. It’s worth the guilt trip afterwards. Mom will get over it – she always does.

P.S. Will there be a Season 2? Of course; the Newkirks are already working on it. The ultraterrestrials wouldn’t have it any other way.

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