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In celebration of the end of SUPERNATURAL, we’re taking a look back at various set visits to the show throughout the years. Earlier this week, we posted a behind the scenes look at props, wardrobe and the show’s signature car. Now, we’re going to take a look back at some of the show’s famous sets.
The original TVAddict visited the set all the way back in 2007, seeing the cemetary where they filmed the season finale “All Hell Breaks Loose”. Years later, I first visited the set in 2011, seeing the chapel where Becky and Sam got married in season 7 and Rufus’ cabin. After that, once the Men of Letters bunker set was built, we visited the art deco inspired space for many years, seeing various rooms and hallways that were added throughout the years.
The week of the finale, we’ll take a look back at outtakes over the years with stars Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki.
SUPERNATURAL airs on Thursdays at 8:00 p.m. ET/PT on The CW. - Slide 1 of 96
2007 (Season 2). During the original TVAddict’s vision to set all the way back when they were filming the season 2 finale, “All Hell Breaks Loose”, he spotted the crypt which served as the Devil’s Gate in the episode.
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2007 (Season 2). This cemetary sat in the middle of the giant Devil’s Trap that Samuel Colt had constructed and served as the final battle scene for season 2.
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2007 (Season 2). More of the cemetary that held the Devil’s Gate.
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2007 (Season 2). John Winchester’s grave stone. John’s sons gave him a hunter’s funeral so he never got a grave stone, but this one is from the season 2 episode “What Is and What Should Never Be”.
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2007 (Season 2). Grave stones that went into the cemetary for “All Hell Breaks Loose”.
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2007 (Season 2). Ellen and Jo’s roadhouse, which was introduced in season 2.
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2007 (Season 2). This devil’s trap was on the ceiling of Bobby’s house. We first saw its power in the season 1 episode “Devil’s Trap”, when Bobby and the Winchesters trapped the original Meg.
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2007 (Season 2). Jared and Jensen’s chairs on set.
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2011 (Season 7). We arrived on set around the time of filming for the episode “Season 7, Time for a Wedding” and we got to tour the empty chapel that had been created in the studio for Sam and Becky’s wedding.
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2011 (Season 7). During our visit, the set wasn’t “dressed”. While the construction crew had built the set itself, others come in to add furniture and props for filming.
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2011 (Season 7). More of the hallway leading to the chapel.
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2011 (Season 7). The pretty fresco painting in the “Chapel of Everlasting Love”.
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2011 (Season 7). The SUPERNATURAL crew hung banners from the rafters representing their awards wins. There’s also one in memory of Kim Manners, a producer on the earlier years of the show who passed away.
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2012 (Season 8). Rufus’ cabin first appeared in the season 7 episode “The Girl Next Store”, when Bobby, Sam and Dead headed there after Bobby’s house burnt down. It made several appearances during seasons 7 and 8.
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2012 (Season 8). The kitchen area of Rufus’ cabin.
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2012 (Season 8). This gives you a sense of the behind the scenes area of sets. Studios are giant warehouses, filled with filming equipment. Sets will grow up in spaces dotted throughout the open areas. Ceilings are not finished so that the crew can light the scene from above. Fake trees are placed outside windows and no one ever built a wall behind the fireplace. For filming, a board would be placed behind the open area in the fireplace that will make the whole thing look like a finished, self-contained room.
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2013 (Season 9). While the Men of Letters bunker was first introduced in season 8, it wasn’t until our season 9 set visit that we got an opportunity to tour it. Jerry Wanek, the show’s production designer, said that there were a lot of people involved in putting it together. Often, the scripts themselves won’t give much direction on how to build sets. With the bunker, “the only description in the script was ‘a concrete bunker’. Because of the breadth of knowledge that the Men of Letters had at their disposal and these are all learned people and what we sort of glommed from all that was they were well-versed in astrology, astronomy, biology, chemistry, whatever the sciences are. Plus mythology. Therefore we have this great library. To put [a set] into a [plain] concrete bunker, after 2 or 3 episodes, you get bored. Because even though concrete walls are very cool and you get that it’s all reinforced, I wanted to do something else. I wanted to do something more.”
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2013 (Season 9). “I love art deco, but you’ve got to be really judicious when you’re doing art deco because it’s such a strong a design period and presence that you can easily overdo it,” Wanek said. “The thought process was that [the Men of Letters] needed a place that had a strong power supply. They shut it down in the 1950’s, so we backtracked. It was open for roughly 20 years, so we just kind of made up our own storyline. We thought ‘okay, during the WPA (Work Projects Administration) movement, they built all of these wonderful art deco power stations throughout the United States. So why not have these guys be in the basement or adjacent to this great power source and then we can take all of these wonderful properties of the art deco that were a part of that WPA period and put it into our set. And that’s really how we came about this.”
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2013 (Season 9).
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2013 (Season 9). Many of the books you see on set will be fake, especially if characters don’t open them up. But books that are featured on the show will originally start as real older books and then the crew added their own covers and built in certain pages that were relevant to the script.
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2016 (Season 12). Almost everything structural in the bunker was made of foam, including the walls, so they could be easily moved to accommodate the shots needed. All of the bookcases were on wheels and moved as well so the cameras could get behind them, especially for long shots. That is “something you have to think of when you’re [building sets] because every director wants to shoot [the bunker] in a way that nobody else has shot it. That just goes with the territory of being a director.”
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2016 (Season 12). A closer look at the card catalogue.
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2016 (Season 12).
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2013 (Season 9). Looking down on the lit map table from the balcony.
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2013 (Season 9).
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2013 (Season 9).
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2013 (Season 9).
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2016 (Season 12). The space above the bunker’s “command centre” had plenty of room to rig lights for particular scenes.
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2013 (Season 9). “I insisted on putting a telescope underground,” Wanek said. “When you see the first reveal of the Men of Letters bunker, we start high on this power station and we come down this hillside and then we find the doorway. So my whole theory was that’s the side of the hill, so the plates would open up and the telescope would project out from the side of the hill. You’re still underground, but you’re built into a hill. So that was my rationale and 99% of the producers liked it.” It wasn’t until season 15 that we learned that the telescope is actually an interdimensional geoscope, thanks to Mrs. Butters in the episode “Last Holiday”.
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2013 (Season 9). A lot of little details went into building the set, Wanek explained. “The freezes – that wonderful little detail that goes around the perimeter – there’s a bunch of little sigils and warning symbols built into that art deco motif. Right above the book cases you’ll find one of our Enochian symbols or one of our sigils. Along the threshold of the doorway, same thing. So we have all the exits and entries covered. So either if somebody’s trapped in here or we don’t want them to get in, we always have safeguards. All of that was part of our lore, obviously, and we built from that.”
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2017 (Season 13). Sam and Dean carved their initials on a bunker table.
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2017 (Season 13).
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2016 (Season 12).
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2016 (Season 12). “[We] had some elements laying around [from previous sets]. The staircase leading to the bunker balcony came from Crowley’s torture basement or whatever we had in year 4 or 5,” Wanek said.
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2017 (Season 13).
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2013 (Season 9). Wanek’s theory was “in order to power this [bunker], we needed to have a power source. So the first time we introduced this there was a CGI of a art deco power station up on the hill and the door into this place was down below. So that’s why there’s power.”
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2013 (Season 9).
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2013 (Season 9). There’s always so much detail that goes into props that there’s a chance the audience might see, including hand-written pages of paper.
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2013 (Season 9).
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2013 (Season 9). Looking down from the balcony in the bunker.
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2013 (Season 9).
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2015 (Season 11).
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2016 (Season 12).
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2016 (Season 12). Originally this piece was made of real circuit boards, but as they kept the set they decided to build their own version so they didn’t have to keep renting the real one.
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2015 (Season 11). The map on the wall is “not really of the United States,” SUPERNATURAL’s art director John Marcynuk explained. “It’s really a map of all the reservations in the United States. So there’s this kind of First People’s symbology hidden in here.”
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2015 (Season 11). According to Marcynuk, “We got the call about a month before [the bunker was set to appear on air]. Maybe a month and a half. We had a very limited amount of time.”
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2015 (Season 11). While this hasn’t really been utilized on the show, Marcynuk once mentioned that they anticipated that secret passages might one day be found in the bunker. “We designed it for such. We have space behind [some of the] bookshelves if they wanted to put in a secret panel. We’ve prepared for that [even though they haven’t written it yet].”
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2015 (Season 11).
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2015 (Season 11). An example of the fake books on the bunker’s bookshelves. While most of the books are fake, Wanek said that a lot of work has gone into making sure they’re all very distinctive-looking.
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2015 (Season 11). “The symbols, which you rarely see, [all have meaning]”. Marcynuk explained that one is spell-based, one is God-based, one is geography-based, etc.
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2015 (Season 11).
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2013 (Season 9).
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2015 (Season 11). They don’t show actual brands on the show, so the crew have created custom labels for everything, including the beer bottles.
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2015 (Season 11). A modern touch that Sam and Dean brought into the bunker.
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2015 (Season 11).
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2015 (Season 11). According to Marcynuk, “Sam’s room and Dean’s room is the same set. We just redress it.”
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2015 (Season 11). Sam’s bedroom.
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2017 (Season 13). Sam’s bed again, a few years later. He’d gotten neater over time!
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2015 (Season 11). Sam’s bedroom. The bunker was meant to have “dorm-style” bedrooms and that utilitarian look remains, although the brothers have occasionally added their own touch to their rooms.
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2017 (Season 13). The table in Sam’s bedroom.
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2017 (Season 13). The desk in Sam’s bedroom.
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2015 (Season 11). Another modern touch in Sam’s bedroom.
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2016 (Season 12). Dean’s bedroom.
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2016 (Season 12). Dean’s bedroom. Broken mirror….a lot of bad luck.
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2016 (Season 12). Beer bottles littered almost every surface of Dean’s bedroom, from the little corner table to the shelf over his bed to the desk.
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2016 (Season 12). The desk in Dean’s bedroom.
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2016 (Season 12). Dean’s bedroom.
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2015 (Season 11). One of the permanent hallway sets built for the bunker. The sets were usually designed for expansion, including things like the hallways. “You never know what they’re going to write,” Marcynuk said.
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2016 (Season 12). Room 23 is the bunker’s kitchen.
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2016 (Season 12). A look inside the kitchen.
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2016 (Season 12).
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2016 (Season 12).
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2016 (Season 12).
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2016 (Season 12).
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2015 (Season 11).
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2016 (Season 12). The back of the fridge in the bunker kitchen came off, which allowed the crew to film from the inside of the fridge outwards. They used this technique in a lot of different episodes, including looking out from the inside of medicine cabinets, for example.
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2015 (Season 11). The dungeon set in the bunker.
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2017 (Season 13). The Del Ray Motel set appeared in a season 13 episode of SUPERNATURAL. For this motel room they wanted to do a design that was “mid-century. Then we started looking for things [that fit the motif],” Wanek explained. They started looking through wallpaper books and settled on the paper here, and settled on a graphic print for the floors.
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2017 (Season 13).
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2017 (Season 13). Wanek had built well over 150 motel sets in the earlier years of the show before the bunker was introduced because SUPERNATURAL was really a “road show”.
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2017 (Season 13). They make the rooms a bit bigger than normal motel rooms to allow for the cameras and also for fight sequences.
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2017 (Season 13).
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2017 (Season 13).
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2017 (Season 13). These cells were in Asmodeus’ lair and are where Lucifer and Castiel were being held captive in season 13.
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2017 (Season 13). These spikes were seen sticking out of the ground in the alternate dimension that Mary and Lucifer were trapped in at the beginning of season 13. Wanek told us that they were modeled to look like the a familiar weapon on the show. “They’re the same exact shape and dimension as an angel blade.” Some of the ones on location were even 20 feet tall.
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2017 (Season 13). This set was created as a damaged church in the alternate universe. It first appeared in the season 13 episode “War of the Worlds” and then was seen in a few other episodes. Wanek said that this church was originally “written as just another concrete bunker and I hate that, so it gives me the sort of creative license to take the story a little further and that’s what we did.”
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2017 (Season 13). Wanek enjoyed creating a large church steeple where the Iron Maiden took the place of a bell, because “there’s some swing to it”. It was originally just written as a “cage off the ground and this is what we came up with.” The size of the Iron Maiden device is also “adjustable”, depending on the size of the actor inside it. At one point, we saw Mary Winchester inside while she was held captive in the alternate universe.
There’s a lot of space between the boards of the various walls in the church, but when you add in atmosphere and light you get really cool shafts of light, called “God rays”. All of this was purposeful when the crew was designing the place. - Slide 1 of 96
2017 (Season 13). This shot shows the level of detail that goes into the sets, from the coloring of the alter to burning the wax of the candles to make the scenes look more authentic. Wanek explained that they’re lucky on SUPERNATURAL because the production crew has a lot of freedom “to take [the sets] to a place where we think is appropriate, as opposed to just being dictated [to].”
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2017 (Season 13). A fresco painting near the altar of the church in the alternate universe.
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2017 (Season 13). A door on the inside of the church leads to a room off to the side of the building.
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2016 (Season 12). Production had a book with blueprints of a lot of old sets (and the new ones), including Bobby’s house, in case they ever needed to bring old sets back.
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2016 (Season 12). The crew also had a reference book of symbols and sigils used throughout the show, detailing the look, dimensions, color and placement on floors, walls or ceilings when used.
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2016 (Season 12).
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2016 (Season 12).
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2018 (Season 14). In November 28, just prior to the 300th episode celebrations, there was a plaque dedication at Canadian Motion Picture Park (CMPP), which is the large lot containing the SUPERNATURAL sound stages (along with other show’s stages). The show’s production office building were officially dedicated as “The Supernatural Stages”.
Photo by Phillip Chin/Getty Images for Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.
In celebration of the end of SUPERNATURAL, we’re taking a look back at various set visits to the show throughout the years. Earlier this week, we posted a behind the scenes look at props, wardrobe and the show’s signature car. Now, we’re going to take a look back at some of the show’s famous sets.