Slayers and Vampires

by Edward Gross,Mark A. Altman

  The beauty of Buffy is that Joss purposely plays to these stereotypes—Buffy is blond, beautiful, petite, and a cheerleader. Also, let’s be honest, the name “Buffy” doesn’t sound very threatening. Instead, Joss shows that Buffy can do the saving, despite looking the part of the typical girl-in-peril trope. Moreover, he plays on this with inserting Xander as someone who needs constant protection. In earlier seasons, Xander is seen bullied in school and becomes the “damsel” in distress, who is saved by Buffy, the new hero.

  HOWARD GORDON

  (executive producer, Homeland)

  Adults can love it and kids can see themselves in it. It just had that voice that makes you sit up and pay attention. I would say that its cult status was burnished because it really was the crucible of adolescence; particularly, being a strong, powerful young woman really resonated with a certain portion of the population that elevated it to cult status.

  ANTHONY C. FERRANTE

  Buffy is surprisingly responsible for how a majority of television has been reinvented. It took some of its cues from The X-Files in the sense of having an overall mythology mixed throughout, but it also deviated from what X-Files did to evolve the television genre itself. The first season of Buffy featured a “Big Bad,” a concept most TV series use as a buzz word during development, even though it came from Buffy, while doing stand-alone episodes as well.

  SARAH LEMELMAN

  The use of long story arcs was not the only tactic that was used which influenced modern television. As the title Buffy the Vampire Slayer suggests, vampires were a crucial component to the success of the show. While vampires have always captured the minds of readers and viewers alike, Buffy has revitalized the vampire genre. Angel is depicted as a romantic hero—with the catch-22 that he can never truly be happy or fulfilled, otherwise he will revert back to his soulless self, Angelus.

  In the first three seasons of Buffy, he is essential to the story line in helping Buffy fight the forces of evil. Angel is despised by other vampires and demons, as he is expected to be torturing defenseless victims, not helping them. His heroic acts and inner sufferings create the image of the “sympathetic” vampire, which the viewer loves and approves of.

  ARMIN SHIMERMAN

  (actor, Principal Snyder)

  Buffy fell in love with a vampire. If she let herself get too close to him she could get hurt. And yet with the growing love for that vampire, she wanted to be closer to that person. You don’t have to go very far to see that as a metaphor for young people’s sexuality. That a young girl is in love with a young man whom she’s frightened of. I assume she hasn’t had a sexual experience yet and that’s what he’s going to want and that she could get hurt by that. And yet, because of her growing love for that person, she wants to but she’s terrified because of how she might get hurt. She might say yes and then the guy may leave her. All kinds of decisions and fears that I, as a man, have no understanding of. But the writers on Buffy did.

  ANTHONY C. FERRANTE

  The characters grew up on Buffy, they graduated, they fell in love with different people, they grew up. The downfall of many shows is doing the same thing all the time. Buffy took a lead heroic character, Angel, and in season two turned him into the “Big Bad” halfway through. It was a ballsy move, and paid dividends. Buffy explored same sex relationships in a way that didn’t feel jaded or a ploy for shock value. And Buffy had shocking deaths of major characters throughout its run—something most shows do almost too ritualistically today.

  SARAH LEMELMAN

  Typically vampire films—and shows—are meant to represent the marginalized groups in society. The most obvious and blatant in-your-face example is the use of vampires in True Blood to represent the LGBTQ community and civil rights in general. It’s set in an unaccepting southern community where people know that vampires exist, but [the vampires] are largely frowned upon.

  In its title sequence, there’s a sign to a store that says “God Hates Fangs,” and the phrase “coming out of the coffin” is used in multiple episodes. In its concluding seasons, the government creates “Hep-V” which is fatal to vampires, and it is clearly meant to be an allegory for HIV/AIDS. We also see this idea of movies representing marginalized groups, in X-Men, where mutants are seen as freaks, and not deserving of equal rights. On a broader level, vampire films are used to represent more straightforward, abstract things, like fear, or the “other.”

  ARMIN SHIMERMAN

  Buffy spoke to the fears, neurosis, of young people. Primarily to young woman who were just learning about their own sexuality, about their own emergence as adults. A great deal of the episodes were metaphors for that emergence. I remember one episode, in particular, where there was a girl who had been neglected, overlooked by all of her classmates and she became invisible and took out her revenge by using that invisibility. Well, I can imagine there were hundreds of thousands of young girls who felt that they were neglected in school and would like to be invisible.

  SARAH MICHELLE GELLAR

  I remember Joss saying the basic principle of the show is you take all that is horrible about youth and all that is scary, and we literally made them into monsters. But I think anyone can relate to what high school is like and how that is the worst monster for you and the worst nightmare, and it was something that was so relatable.

  MARTI NOXON

  (executive producer, UnReal)

  These people—Buffy, Oz, Xander, Willow, Cordelia—they are teenagers. They make mistakes—and they should, for emotional reasons. They do stuff that isn’t very smart just as most of us do when we are that age. When I was trying to decide if I wanted to take the job, which wasn’t a very hard decision, but I hadn’t seen the show, so I was watching the episode “Angel,” when Buffy is fighting Angel at the very end and then she bares her neck to him, and says “Go ahead, take me, if you can, go ahead and kill me, if you can.” I thought, this is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen, because she’s the hero, but she’s an adolescent, and she’s going to make decisions sometimes out of total emotion, out of passion, as opposed to her head, which makes it that much more interesting. That’s one of the things I loved about these characters: they’re fighting evil, but they were still teenagers.

  STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT

  (director, Pacific Rim 2: Uprising)

  All the writers were giant fans of this genre and if I have one big complaint about other genre shows I see on TV, it’s hearing about people who work on them and getting the sense that the creators, the people who run these other shows, don’t have the love of the genre. If you don’t really have the love of it, you don’t understand it. That’s where you get things that seem creaky and a little too earnest and clumsy. It’s because that’s what they think the genre is. And it’s not. You go back to the original Star Trek. It’s the beautiful metaphor that you can tell a story about gay marriage, you can tell a story about terrorism, you can tell a story about racism, under the guise of flights of fancy. By God, we need another Rod Serling!

  THOMAS P. VITALE

  (executive vice president, Programming and Original Movies, Syfy and Chiller)

  Unfortunately, aside from the notably great sci-fi and supernatural shows we all know and love, most genre television series before the 1990s weren’t made with the fan in mind . . . and probably most of them weren’t made by fans. In fact, there are too many mediocre genre shows in television history in which the sci-fi or supernatural elements are just used as a “setting,” but not much more. In other words, if you removed the genre elements from the show, the story would still work.

  Conversely, in the best science fiction and supernatural literature, the genre elements are critical to the stories and those elements work as metaphor in addition to being used as part of the plot. But Buffy was important in the history of genre shows, because the genre elements are crucial to the story. Most important, Buffy was made by fans for fans. Buffy succeeded on every level—great characters, great stories, great metaphor and symbols, great homages,
and great buzz among its target audience.

  ARMIN SHIMERMAN

  So, why is it endearing? Because it speaks to universal problems that young people have. And then of course it spoke to other things as well. It was a very powerful cast, with very good directors, and of course incredibly good writers.

  TIM MINEAR

  (executive producer, American Horror Story)

  It also had a sense of humor, but because it was called Buffy, I don’t think that the network or some of the executives ever really understood what it was. I think they all thought that it was John Waters on some level, that it was camp. In fact, this was as far from camp as can be. It was serious hero drama . . . with some funny.

  DAN VEBBER

  For me, it was always about the characters. They were the smartest and funniest written characters that I’d seen at that point on a television show. That’s just Joss’s character voice that he writes in. It’s very quick banter and very pop culture savvy driven by goals which are heightened compared to real world characters. At first, it was the dialogue that appealed to me. Plus, being a genre fan I did enjoy the horror stories. I immediately latched onto the metaphor of the show: that high school is hell. I saw it as a place I could really pitch some stories that I thought would be really funny.

  DAVID FURY

  (executive producer, 24)

  When I met Joss, he was specifically looking for comedy writers. He kind of knew what the tone of the show was and he was also aware that a lot of drama writers can’t do comedy and so when the show was initially in development, he had a lot to figure out, but he knew he wanted comedy writers.

  DAN VEBBER

  At that point I was exclusively a comedy writer, so I only thought in terms of, “Will this be funny or not?” That was always my first thing. And that was a detriment to me working on a show like Buffy, because emotion on Buffy is such a huge part of it. That’s something I did not have a lot of experience in and I was learning from Joss about the basic things involved in constructing a dramatic story for a one-hour TV show, because I had never done it before.

  ANTHONY C. FERRANTE

  Like any genre, the vampire genre itself had been run into the ground right before Buffy arrived. There had been clever deviations on the formula. There were horror comedies like Love at First Bite, Vampire’s Kiss, Fright Night, and Vamp that had fun with the vampire concept and you had groundbreaking reinventions like The Hunger and Martin. But what was brilliant about Joss Whedon is that he has a unique voice that looks at the world and genre in a different way. That allowed him to approach Buffy from a different vantage point, first with the original movie and then later with the TV series. He appreciated the conventions that came with the genre, but he wanted to find a way to subvert it by grounding it in metaphor as well.

  STEVE BIODROWSKI

  I’m not sure any vampire films in particular had a big effect on Joss Whedon. The impression I get is that he caught bits and pieces on the late show and mashed them together for an audience that wouldn’t know the difference. I suppose the Hammer vampire films were influential, at least indirectly, in that they tended to feature action. Count Dracula was never staked in his coffin—at least not successfully—there was usually some kind of struggle or fight scene, the most memorable being the one in Horror of Dracula, with Christopher Lee’s Dracula and Peter Cushing’s Van Helsing fighting to the death. And, of course, Hammer gave us Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires (aka The Seven Brothers Meet Dracula), which combined vampires with martial arts.

  ANTHONY C. FERRANTE

  I also think Buffy owes a huge debt to Kolchak: The Night Stalker series as well. The Buffy movie felt a bit broader than the TV show, which is more in line with Whedon’s quirky sensibilities. And as he gained more of a footing as a show runner, and later director, the show’s identity really came to the fore. Whedon is a great storyteller, who understands why great genre movies work—they were about something more than just the monsters. Strip away the vampires and monsters from Buffy and it’s about a high school girl coming of age. Look at George A. Romero’s Dead movies, and those films are allegories for other things.

  HARRY GROENER

  (actor, Mayor Richard Wilkins)

  Part of its success is not just the vampire myth. It’s the sense of humor of it. It’s funny. It doesn’t take itself too seriously and it has a moral. It teaches something. It can be about abuse or it can be about bullying or it can be about whatever it is. And the monsters are actually monsters.

  JOSE MOLINA

  (co–executive producer, Agent Carter)

  What resonated with me and what probably resonated with a lot of people was that it was a high school story, first and foremost. The monsters she were battling were all metaphors for the travails that a high school student goes through while they’re in school. The other thing that I found really unique about Buffy is that here she is, this beautiful, former cheerleader, all the boys think she’s cute and want to date her. But the people that she chooses to hang out with are these couple of misfits. And she’s a bit of a dork herself. I had never seen that before. I’d never seen a girl who looked like Sarah Michelle Gellar being one of us. One of the nerdy, geeky, high school losers. She was a relatable action hero who you kind of identified with. You either wanted to hang out with her or be part of her gang.

  SARAH LEMELMAN

  One of the major reasons that Buffy was able to garner such interest from fans and scholars alike is the fact that the program’s main characters are marginalized and considered outsiders, which . . . was not a typical formula for television in the 1990s, and even today. Rather than most teenage television series that showcase “popular” high schoolers, such as jocks and cheerleaders, Catherine Siemann calls Buffy’s protagonist the “ex-cheerleader who fell from grace,” who is paired with two other outsiders, the shy Willow considered a “brainiac,” and the awkward Xander, who uses humor to deflect derision from his classmates. Joss Whedon stood firmly behind the idea that “the show is about disenfranchisement, about the people nobody takes seriously” and [consulting producer] David Greenwalt stated that “if Joss Whedon had one good day in high school we wouldn’t be here.”

  STEVE BIODROWSKI

  Xander, to me, seems to be in the tradition of sidekicks like Harry Sullivan, from the Tom Baker era of Doctor Who: Harry looked like he should be the archetypal male hero, but since that role was already taken, Harry was a bit of a third wheel, who had to settle for providing comic relief, though his assistance did come in handy from time to time. The only difference is that Xander was playing second fiddle to a woman.

  SARAH LEMELMAN

  Obviously, Whedon himself faced struggles that the average, day-to-day teenager faces in high school, and not many television shows have been keen on portraying this. The Scoobies, ignoring their involvement with the supernatural, do not fit into the mainstream, and Whedon wanted to embrace this, hoping that it would provide a connection for viewers who were not always accepted by their high school peers.

  HARRY GROENER

  Everything has been pretty much said about how talented Joss is. He was just incredibly perceptive, and in tune and in touch with those kids. He knew how to write for them. He knew how to characterize the angst that was going on in these kids and he’s fast on his feet.

  JOSE MOLINA

  There was a sense of inclusiveness, which is a word we use a lot nowadays. But even back then I felt like the Scooby Gang was open to anybody who wasn’t an asshole. And even if someone was an asshole like Cordelia, if her heart was in the right place, she was still welcome.

  SARAH LEMELMAN

  Whedon’s portrayal of high school “rejects,” aside from the Scooby Gang, is especially shown in the earlier seasons, most notably in the episodes “Out of Mind, Out of Sight” and “Earshot,” which depict a girl who feels ignored by the rest of the world—and turns invisible—and a bullied boy who attempts to commit suicide, respectively. Buffy addresses these struggles to any
ostracized students and sends the message to viewers that “belonging” does not mean a person has to be “cool” or popular but that having a supportive network of friends and family is more important than fitting into mainstream society.

  JOSS WHEDON

  It was about four years after the end of the run of Buffy that I really just went “Oh, I was Buffy! The whole time.” I always thought I was Xander before he started getting laid. I’m the wacky sidekick. Then I had this shocking moment of idiotic revelation that I’d been writing about myself that whole time.

  HELLMOUTH OR HIGH WATER

  “A Slayer with family and friends. That sure as hell wasn’t in the brochure.”

  In the beginning, there was the movie. And the movie kinda sucked. It certainly wasn’t what its writer, Joss Whedon, had intended. Not entirely surprising considering that he was “only” the film’s writer, attempting to move from working on such television shows as Roseanne and NBC’s first attempt at bringing the movie Parenthood to TV into features—which was long before he ever contemplated putting Iron Man, Captain America, and the rest of the Avengers through their cinematic paces.

  Whedon, who would go on to become one of the most successful and highly paid script doctors in the go-go ’90s, when it wasn’t uncommon for a scribe to get a million dollars for a week’s worth of rewriting on a big-budget action film, grew up on the tony West Side of Manhattan, in a family for whom the performing arts were nothing new, seemingly right out of a Noah Baumbach movie like The Squid and the Whale.

  JOSS WHEDON

  (creator / executive producer, Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

  My parents were theater geeks in a big way and also just film lovers. They would just take us to things that were wildly inappropriate or strange. I saw The Exorcist in the theater when I was like nine. It didn’t damage me. And my mom was head of the history department and every year she would abuse her power to rent a bunch of 16 mm movies and throw them up on our living room wall before she showed them to her students. Every year for like ten years we watched The General, Steamboat Bill, Nosferatu, Grand Illusion, The Seventh Seal, and a couple of others. Not only did I get to see movies a lot with my parents, but I got to see the same ones over and over and over and over, which is really the key. That’s the thing that makes you go, oh, wait a minute, now I want to know how that’s done. I’m not saying Star Wars didn’t help. That also.