Charles Rowland (Jayden Revri) and Edwin Payne (George Rexstrew) are masters in their field. As the Dead Boy Detectives, they specialize in solving supernatural cases that would otherwise remain unsolved — like their own deaths. So cracking the lingering “Case of the Devlin House” should just be a feather in their cap, right?
Well, let’s review how it meets their criteria as a case only they could solve: After freeing Niko (Yuyu Kitamura) from her Sprites infestation in Episode 2, the Dead Boy Detectives, Niko, and clairvoyant Crystal (Kassius Nelson) are ready to take on a new client in Episode 3. When freshly minted ghost Susan arrives in their office (aka Crystal’s apartment), she presumes they know the terrifying lore of the Devlin family’s murder in 1994. But as they’re new in town, alas, they do not.
They soon learn this woman’s brother-in-law snapped one night and killed his family in cold blood and then himself. Although Susan inherited the house, she could never bring herself to go in. But now that she’s recently dead, she wants to visit one last time before moving on. When she gets close though, she hears screaming and realizes that 30 years later, something horrible is still in that house. And with the city about to tear down the house, she can’t move on till she knows her family is at peace.
As co-showrunner Beth Schwartz explains, Dead Boy Detectives is a series that gets “as psychedelic as possible while still honoring the mystery-horror tone.” And since Charles and Edwin are used to facing ghosts and demons galore, why would entering the house haunted by the Devlin family be so scary? Below, we explore the four most horror-inducing moments of Episode 3:
There’s no way around it. Mr. Devlin using an axe to butcher his family is utterly terrifying. After discovering his daughter received an acceptance letter to go away to university, he flips. And instead of turning down his music (“Owner of a Lonely Heart” by Yes) and joining his family for movie night downstairs, he does the unthinkable. He ignores their cries and brutally slices them up instead. But why are Charles, Edwin, and Crystal watching it happen in real time when Mr. Devlin killed his family 30 years ago?
Because the family is stuck in a loop! Doomed to listen to the opening guitar riff of the Yes song on repeat. “It’s an earworm from the correct decade, so we’re already winning,” says co-showrunner Steve Yockey. “Such a great start to our loop.” Not to mention rewind and replay their murders like a nightmare VHS tape because the emotional trauma of their deaths was visceral enough to leave a psychic imprint on the house. They’re locked in the cycle, unable to change anything and unaware that they’re even dead.
Who could imagine the horror of being forced to relive the most gruesome moments of their lives over and over again? And if the cycle doesn’t stop, they will be erased when the house gets torn down. No afterlife, just darkness. The Dead Boy Detectives have to act, fast!
Charles is “the brawn” of the Dead Boy Detectives, and as Revri says, always tries to be exceedingly charming, with a smile on his face. “I myself am quite chipper and upbeat,” adds Revri. So when he first approached adapting the character from the comics, “I saw a lot of myself in him and used that as my initial motivation.” But when Charles finds Hope’s (one of the Devlin daughters) diaries and recognizes a kindred spirit in her words, his smile falters. When Crystal comes to check on him, he shares that, like Mr. Devlin, his own father was controlling, and that no matter how nice he was or how good at sports he was, nothing he did would ever be good enough for his old man.
Charles’ devastating reveal calls back to the end of Episode 1, when Charles shows Crystal how he checks on his parents through a looking glass mirror once a week. It isn’t just because he misses them. He wants to make sure that his father doesn’t physically beat his mother like he used to hurt Charles. Revri would receive scripts chronologically as they were filming. So once they’d finished the pilot and Episode 2, he read Episode 3 and “realized why he puts on such a front of happiness. Because under all of that is a 16-year-old boy who didn’t have a stable family or friendship group,” he says.
To prepare for these emotional scenes, Revri had really open conversations with professionals who have helped people who have been through the same kind of struggles Charles has in order to stick to his core feelings and story. “They really helped me get into the right mind frame before those heavy scenes, and they also helped me with being able to leave it on the dance floor,” he says. Revri is also grateful for his caring cast and producers around him who “held my hand through the whole process and treated the scenes with the utmost respect.”
While spirits getting stuck on a time loop is scary in the supernatural sense, enduring abuse from your parental figure is much scarier, since it doesn’t only exist in a ghostly realm.
Charles shares how gutted he is that, despite how desperate Hope was to graduate and escape her home life, she is now forced to continually endure it. After failing to find the right trigger cause of the time loop and make it stop, Charles’s rage comes to the surface. He lives up to his “brawn” reputation and attacks Mr. Devlin, avenging the Devlin family and himself. But unfortunately, the result is Charles getting stuck in the loop, too — because he has had such a strong emotional response to the trauma.
Yockey and Schwartz had always imagined Episode 3 to directly hit on Charles’ troubled past. “Using the genre element of the show, it allowed us to go as dark as possible, which we certainly did with a father brutally murdering his family over and over again on a loop,” says Schwartz. “The case had to be violent, and relentless in order for Charles to be triggered and access his repressed pain and trauma. It’s in this episode you see for the first time, Charles can no longer hide behind his happy facade. His veneer has been cracked.”
Aside from someone we care about now getting pulled into the horror show, there’s also another scary realization for Edwin, who didn’t know until now how his best friend of three decades has silently suffered for years.
After Revri secured the part of Charles, DC sent him every rendition of the comics where the Dead Boy Detectives appear, and he watched the episodes of Doom Patrol with the boys in it. So he had a good idea of Charles’ past. “Steve, Beth, and I had many conversations on where we were going to take this version of Charles, and they were always very open and supportive when having these conversations with me,” says Revri. He trusted every decision they made regarding his character’s backstory. “I knew that they were going to deliver incredible material.”
So how are Edwin and Crystal going to save their friend?! They discover the music is coming from Mr. Devlin’s hidden computer room, where he has cameras set up around the house so he can constantly be aware of the goings-on of his family. (Talk about controlling.) They see the scene of the family’s murder replay on the monitors, so Crystal comes up with the idea to record over the VHS tape of the family to stop the time loop.
But just as they’re about to save Charles, a misery wraith appears, drawn to the murder scene. Edwin is familiar with the wraith, having seen others like it during his 70 years in hell, and remembers that they feed on negative emotions. If you attract a misery wraith with negativity, it will break your mind and feed off your agony for years. With the stakes raised exponentially, Edwin tries to encourage Crystal to think happy thoughts, only for her demonic ex-boyfriend to possess her mind once again. SOS!
As Crystal faces “David the D” in his liminal space domain with floating eyeballs, the Dead Boy Detectives’ psychedelic tone stays intact — even though this case and episode is extremely dark. “It’s the perfect example of how we get to blend the two tones!” says Schwartz.
Ever the “brains” of the Dead Boy Detectives, Edwin is able to figure out how to record over a VHS tape and release the Devlin family — and Charles — from the murder carousel. But the effects of the case remain, especially for Charles. As costume designer Kelli Dunsmore tells Tudum, his signature red polo (from the comics) turned burgundy in Episode 3, to reflect his turbulent emotional state. “Then we find out that beautiful whole story of Charles’ past, and it goes black,” she says. “In the middle [of the season], he goes all black — his Harrington jacket is black, his polo is black.” Yockey praises Dunsmore for coming to him and Schwartz early with this subtle but very strong idea of “a way to visually track Charles and his slide into self-doubt even though his base costume remains constant.”
And if you look in Episode 4, you’ll see Crystal and Niko wearing red clothing, to support Charles in his pain by donning his hero color. But as Charles continues his healing journey, his shirt “slowly goes back to burgundy. By the end of the [season], he’s back in his red again,” says Dunsmore. “So he goes full circle.”
Throughout the series, Charles battles the idea that he’s going to turn out like his dad and his previous friends who beat him (to death). “You really see that come to life through Episodes 3 and 4 with the outbursts he has,” says Revri. “But by Episode 7, when Charles decides to risk his life and save his best friend, I think the audience will be able to see that this is the peak of his healing and the end to his self-doubt. Further down the line, I would love to see Charles start talking openly about his pain and using it as a tool to help others, especially in new difficult cases he may face.”
At least there’s some light that emerges from the Devlin house of horrors.
Stream Dead Boy Detectives now, only on Netflix.
