Spooks

**Spooks** (also known as **Grim Life**) is an American adult animated Horror-comedy series for Adult Swim. The show is created by and written by Ralf Hat, and currently has 13 seasons, with ten episodes in each (130 episodes). *Spooks*features the violent, and terrifying adventures of Aaron Patterson, a young adult who was killed one day, and was recruited to be the apprentice of the Grim Reaper. Aaron, the Grim Reaper, along with the Angel, Michael spend their time, hunting demons, spirits, and other supernatural entities to save the world from "true Hell". Overall, the show parodies many horror films, stories, video games, or culture throughout. The series originally aired its first season on Spike in 2000, while season two and up aired on Adult Swim. In the United States, Spooks is rated TV-MA-LSV, and is unrated on all home releases.

## Overview

**Aaron Patterson** is a 22 year old man who lives in America's most haunted city, Dark Hallows. He is very nice and caring, even though bad things happen to him. His girlfriend dumps him, he gets fired, and basically everyone hates him except his brother who is more wealthier and socially better than him. One day however, Aaron is killed and sacrificed by a group of masked people, and awakens as a ghost. He escapes Limbo, and eventually meets the **Grim Reaper**, who recruited Aaron to become his own apprentice. In the episode **The Mountain**, we are introduced to a triagonist, **Michael**the Angel, who also plays an important role in the series.

### Seasons 1 - 4

The first four seasons focussed on the afterlife of Aaron, Grim, and Michael, as they hunt supernatural entities, and bring them back to Limbo, to serve their sentence. The three also have to face normal adult problems as well, throughout the series as a joke.

### Seasons 5 - 10

Seasons five to ten consisted of better animation, heavier gore and violence throughout.

## Production/Development

### Creation

Son of Hat was always a fan of horror films, scary legends, and creepypastas. He was a fan of violent, and gory ideas. He first came up with the idea of Spooks when he was only seven years old, and started drawing pictures of the main characters, and planned out a full plot, hoping to make a comic out of the idea.

Spooks as a comic series had a large popularity in Hat's school, but was unfortunately cancelled due to violent and gory content in his school grounds. Hat soon forgot about this idea, until later In his life, when he was urged to create a horror short film, which later aired on Spike Halloween of 1999.

### Writing

The planning for each episode begins with a table meeting of writers, who discuss the plot ideas as a group. A single staff writer reads and writes the script. Once the first draft of a script is finished, the writers and executive producers call in the actors to do a table read, to see if they are ok with it. After this script reading, the writers collaborate to rewrite the script as a group before eventually sending it to the animation team. At this point the voice recording is also started and the script is out of the writers' hands.

Son of Hat writes nearly all episodes, each containing crude jokes, gore, and terror. Every episode script is shown to the producers of Adult Swim only to see if the crew likes it, before animating it.

## Media

### Film

* *Main Article: Spooks: Blood & Water*

In Summer of 2013, at Comic-Con, Adult Swim opened its Spooks panel. Son of Hat announced there, that a film based on the series, intitled: *Spooks: Blood & Water*, has been midway through production. The film scheduled to be released in theaters on October 27, 2016, and became a box office success, gaining $312 million. The film follows the main characters on a mission to stop the fabled demon-war apocalypse known as the Hell Days, by traveling to Hell and searching for the legendary *Blood Stone*. The film is said to be the series finale of the show, until it has two more seasons left.

### Video GamesEdit

* *Main Article(s): Spooks (Video Game) and*Spooks: The Fallen