‘Ghostfacers’ Premieres Today!

CSI Files previously reported that AJ Buckley (CSI: New York‘s Adam Ross) co-wrote and starred in a 10-episode Ghostfacers web series, which is an online spinoff of the hour-long drama Supernatural. The first two episodes of the web series go live on CWTV.com today to coincide with Supernatural‘s 100th episode. (More information and embedded video after the jump!)

In the series, Buckley and co-writer Travis Wester reprise their Supernatural roles as Ed Zeddmore and Harry Spangler, two members of a ghost-hunting team who were featured in several episodes of the main series. Ed and Harry were introduced in “Hell House” during season one, and they returned with a whole crew of paranormal investigators in season three’s “Ghostfacers”. (The Ghostfacers also had a small role in “It’s a Terrible Life” during Supernatural‘s fourth season.) The Ghostfacers web series is shot in a faux-documentary style. Each of the episodes will be 3-4 minutes in length, and two new episodes will be posted each Thursday for five consecutive weeks.

For Wester and Buckley, it was important to include character development over the course of the series—including a reference to fallen Ghostfacer comrade Corbett (Dustin Mulligan), who was killed in “Ghostfacers”. “We wanted to laugh with the characters and cry with them and be afraid with them all kind of at the same time,” Buckley revealed. “Each character has its own journey; there’s the lightheartedness of the Ghostfacers but they have real scares and real drama and…there’s this whole bit that we tied into losing Corbett and how that affected each character’s dynamic and what that means. If another one of our Facers is in trouble, how much higher are the stakes?”

“We don’t want Ghostfacers to just be this slapstick, laugh out loud thing,” Wester continued. “They’re real people with real emotions, and they’re facing real tension—killer ghosts. You can be funny to a point, but at a certain point it’s time to face up and take a look at what you’re dealing with, and it’s intense.”

Creating a web series meant going against some rules normally associated with television—essentially, Ghostfacers is breaking new ground. “No one really understands this territory,” Buckley explained. “Even when we were going through the writing stuff, we were calling the WGA, and they didn’t really have the answers…No one kind of really knows, so to be a part of it right out of the gates and figuring it out as we go along is exciting because there hasn’t been a series that’s really defined what it is, so if we can be a cog in the wheel to help do that, that’s great. It’s a whole other bag of tricks.”

You can check out a sneak peek from the web series below: