It’s always the anniversary of something – we can’t help marking the passage of time, noting that this or that happened sooo long ago and that we, therefore must now be old. Just a few months ago, coinciding with the lead up to the new Scream movie, I ran into countless reassessments of the original, then hitting its 25th anniversary. I remember seeing it in the cinema, home for Christmas break my first year of college (somehow I seemed to be the only person in a packed house who thought it was funny – the guys I was with were all disappointed it wasn’t scarier), and to think that was a quarter of a century ago is, what, humbling, perhaps? But we’re not looking at Scream today (though I do think it’s great and I did rather enjoy the most recent outing) – it’s recently been brought to my attention that something else just had its 25th anniversary back in March, something of which I became such an obsessive fan that I feel behooved to mark the occasion. So today, let’s have a look back at a TV series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
This is the first time I’m writing about TV here and it is a bit daunting. It’s one thing to write about a 2 hour movie, but where do you start with something that’s over 100 hours long? I think that short of rebranding my entire blog, I can only approach it as personally as possible, try to approach why I responded to it as strongly as I did, and look at where it connects with horror for me, as that is ultimately what this blog is about.
How I Came To It
Though Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Hereinafter, BtVS) premiered in March of 1997, I came to the party much later. I had really liked the poorly received 1992 film (it was worth it for Paul Reubens’s death scene alone) and when the show first came out I thought it looked nothing like the film I’d so enjoyed and just wrote it off as some stupid TV thing that wasn’t worth my time. I was also in my first year of college and really too busy to commit to a weekly serial.
Five years later, I was out of school and newly relocated to Chicago where I shared an apartment with a good friend, thanks to whom I finally reappraised the show. But I must say, on reintroduction, I was not much more charitable than I had been back in 1997. I remember one Sunday night, I’d come home from a party with some friends and my roommate was watching TV. I asked him what it was, and when he said “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” I kind of laughed and went to my room to crash. The next week, I’d again been out with some friends and when I came home, I once more asked what he was watching and when he told me the same thing, I was like “Again? Ok, I’m going to bed.” Finally, one week later, when I came home on Sunday night and he was watching the show, I gave in, sat down and started watching too, starting to pester him with questions about who everyone was and what was going on. By the end of that episode, I was hooked.
At that point, on Sunday nights, there were episodes from the end of Season 3. On Saturday afternoons, there were episodes from late in Season 4. When either of these would hit the end of Season 5, it would loop back around to the beginning of the series. Finally, on Tuesday nights, new episodes from Season 6 aired. This still being an era of VHS, I was taping all of them and working my way through three different points of the timeline simultaneously. Everything was spoiled in a way, but it was also an interesting, engrossing kind of immersion. And soon, the DVD sets started coming out, so when my roommate started buying them (he had a computer with a dvd player), I finally watched the beginning. By the middle of the summer, I’d caught up and was waiting with bated breath for the 7th and final season.
What Hooked Me?
In the beginning, I’m sure it was a combination of the wittiness of the dialogue and the scale of the plotting that got my attention, but it wasn’t long before I’d really come to love the characters. On top of that, there was an ambition to some of the filming and a richness of themes and ideas that simply went beyond what I had expected from a silly teen superhero-horror melodrama.
I loved the scope of the storytelling. With a relatively limited budget, and some admittedly shaky CGI, we have huge tales of ancient vampires vying for power, a Hellmouth waiting to spew forth all manner of eldritch evil, returning earth to its original, monstrous state, a chaos god who will rend reality to go home, a demon called forth to swallow the world, and a really affable politician who really just wants to be a big snake. Standing against it all, we have one girl who never volunteered for this and her not terribly cool friends, all of whom have to deal with these grand conflicts while enduring the countless normal trials of high school.
Buffy the character, on one level, embodies the most standard reluctant hero tropes, but situating all of that in the bubbly blonde girl, constantly underestimated, forever discounted, sometimes even by herself, gives it a freshness, a lightness. She is called on, time and time again to sacrifice herself (she dies – twice), her lover, and her family – in many ways she is a classic tragic hero – and yet so much of her journey is finding the way to do all of that and still live, laugh, love – staying connected to the world, to friends, to community and thus, not to succumb to the role (in fact, in the series finale, the group manages to share Buffy’s power with countless other young women – thus both empowering that community and making her no longer the sole lonely hero – to quote Giles, “the subtext is rapidly becoming text”). As an overarching theme, it’s hard to resist.
Essential to this larger story then of course, are the friends and lovers and family that ground her, and they are also what make the show so addictive. Buffy is surrounded by, at least in the beginning, “normal” people – without power, without social position (though some of them certainly become quite powerful by the end), just a shy bookish wallflower, a kinda goofy guy lacking direction, a nebbishy librarian, and a single mother trying to get a fresh start. It’s easy to know them, to love them, and written in such a pleasant and piquant manner, you want to come back each week to hang out with them. We may not all be tortured heroes, doomed to tragic romance and burdened with terrible purpose, but a central ethos of the show is that it does take a village.
Another hook here is the show’s format, one which now may seem old fashioned, but may have helped usher in the current age of prestige television. These days, shows are made to be consumed in a weekend – a season of about ten episodes, each one ending on a cliffhanger so you have to start the next to let the story continue. But around the time that BtVS came out, procedurals were pretty much the order of the day. For a show that aired once a week over about 22 weeks, it was pretty standard to make each one a standalone story that didn’t require audiences to have seen everything that had come before (there were of course exceptions to this – soap operas and weekly dramas, but I do think it was the dominant model). What BtVS managed to do, when it was at its best, was to really thread the needle.
Every episode could be a “monster of the week,” but woven through these over the course of the season, there were also large narrative arcs – with seeds planted early which could come to fruition later and set off a larger conflict/development/threat that would really deliver a powerful dramatic climax to the story each year. This arc was propelled by the characters and it would see them undergo real changes. It was really satisfying plotting. At the same time, the episodic, procedural nature kept things fresh and let characters just be together and interact while getting the necessary work done. They had room to breathe, to have downtime, to be people, people with whom it was easy to identify.
On that identification, the sixth season, the one with new episodes that year I got hooked, took a real turn from those before it. Previously, there had always been some “Big Bad,” the main villain of the season who ultimately Buffy and the gang would have to thwart in their evil plans. This might be a really old master vampire (the Master) or it might be a crazy god (Glory), but in this season, that was turned on its head. Ostensibly, the main villain was a triumvirate of toxic, geeky guys, but that was a red herring. Really, the “Big Bad” that year was just life. All of the main characters at that point were out of school, their parents were out of the picture, and life was just kicking their butts. Engagements fell through. There were substance abuse issues (magic abuse, actually, but still). Everyone had to be responsible for themselves and make ends meet, and it was hard, and people were just self-destructing. I can’t say that I had any particular problems that year; in fact, life was pretty good. But it was my first year out of college and I could really feel for these characters who had accomplished so much, but who were now struggling to live in the real world, having lost the structure of childhood, school, and family. It was one way that it really felt personal.
Is It Horror?
Though it may contain myriad monsters (vampires, of course, but also werewolves, witches, mummies, ghosts, zombies, demons, giant insects, ventriloquist dummies, fish-people, cultists, tentacled otherworldly mind crushing beings; the list goes on), and there are even a couple of episodes that approach scary (Hush; Helpless; Killed by Death; Same Time, Same Place; among others), it’s hard to say it’s really a horror show. But it is rooted in horror (see the beasties enumerated above) and it does something that horror does; using the fantastical, the supernatural, it talks about real, emotional, social, political, psychological experiences, and specifically, fears. Beginning with the central metaphor that ‘high school can be hell,’ it brings that to life more effectively by having Xander, for example, get possessed by a hyena and eat a cute pig, than it would be able to as a straight teen drama. Sometimes it can be a bit ham-fisted (oh, Beer Bad…), but most of the time, there is a positive feedback loop between the superhero-horror story and the difficult life experience represented by it.
Probably the prime example of this is when Angel, Buffy’s vampire love interest for the first couple seasons, literally loses his soul after they sleep together for the first time (due to an oddly conceived “gypsy curse”). He’d seemed like such a nice guy and suddenly he’s this cold, sociopathic monster. An event like that could exist on a “realistic” teen drama, but it is elevated beyond the melodramatic by playing out on this nigh mythic level, part of a tale of magic and revenge, and love and betrayal, of literally life and death, with the world at stake; and at the same time, that epic storyline benefits so greatly from the emotion that comes from this familiar, realistic, identifiable experience that any teenager could have.
Perhaps due in part to the extent to which BtVS and Horror in general both lean into metaphor, an interesting trait they share is that they are both very much analyzed and written about. That first summer that I’d really gotten into BtVS, I stumbled upon what was for me at the time, a really novel book, “Fighting the Forces: What’s at Stake in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” This was a multi-disciplinary series of academic essays, all focused on the TV show I’d just gotten obsessed with, and I ate it up. I’d recently finished grad school, in Performance Studies (focused on performance theory and, in an anthropological sense, using performance as a lens to view human activity, and vice versa). But I’d not yet encountered serious scholarly investigation of a pop culture artifact such as this, especially given how hard I had fallen for it. (This may now be hard to find, but Slayage: the International Journal of Buffy+ Studies is still active and all publications are free on their website.)
After this first book, I found a few others, and I’m not certain, but I think there’s a pretty good chance that it was going down this rabbit hole that led me to scholarly works on horror (Noel Carroll, Carol J. Clover, Barbara Creed, etc.), and it was discovering these readings of horror texts that really changed my relationship to the genre. This was possibly when I really became a fan. I didn’t just enjoy a good scary movie occasionally, but now I was really thinking about the genre, considering its artistic and philosophical value in a wholly new way. In horror I found another collection of work that people readily scoff at and put down, but which is rich in meaning, in experience, and the appreciation of which invites interrogation. So, it is possible that I have Buffy to thank for that.
What About Joss?
So a certain name has been notably absent in my discussion thus far – Joss Whedon, the creator and show runner of not only BtVS, but also its spinoff show Angel and a few other fantastical fan favorites. In recent years, unsavory details have come to light about how he ran the show and what the dynamics were like behind the scenes. It hasn’t quite risen to #metoo levels, but it seems he sleazily used his position to secure romantic relationships with employees and was abusive and cruel, particularly to certain actresses and female staffers. This is more than a little disheartening as the show always had an outwardly feminist self-presentation and his voice is just all over the show. That warm wittiness, the dramatic choices made for characters and the larger narratives – it feels like him. Having watched 5 different series that he created and a few films, his voice is clear. Many have said recently that it’s important to focus on the fact that many, many people are involved in making a TV show and have thus tried to minimize his influence on it all, but I think that’s disingenuous. From what I’ve read, this really was an auteur situation, even with a large team working beneath him.
I think that while of course the show stands on its own and holds up regardless of what details have come out about its creator, now when watching it and hearing dialogue that is so clearly in his voice, a pall is cast, a reminder of the ugliness that has gone into this artwork I love – and it can leave a sour taste in the mouth. And yet, I do still love it. And there is that bad taste. Both things can be true.
We live in an era when we are called on to hold ourselves accountable for enjoying the work of people whom we’ve learned bad things about, and thus to stop enjoying that work. To some extent, I see the value in not giving my money, which I work for, to someone who is actively using it to do something I disagree with. But if I were to decide that I shouldn’t watch this show anymore, a show that I have found such joy and comfort and excitement in, who benefits and who is harmed? Is anyone affected but me? Probably not. Some may feel that the bad taste makes it impossible to appreciate the material as they had once done, and I can understand that feeling (perhaps, I am able to stomach it only because I haven’t had to directly put up with certain things in my life – and that is a position of privilege), but for myself, as I attempt to navigate an ethical life, I think I’ll just ride that train of cognitive dissonance. The world is complicated. Twas ever thus.
Plus, I’ve already got all the dvds and I’m not giving them back.