I’m writing this essay from New Orleans, a few days after another Mardi Gras has come and gone. I’m currently occupying a liminal space where time returns to its normal patterns. The strange hours recently created by parades, parties, and late-night-costume-making have faded away and the visual buffet of glitter, flesh, and excess is being packed up for another year. I’m recuperating from a cold by rehydrating, eating soup and vegetables, and rewatching comfort movies from my youth. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is one of those movies. Released in the summer of 1992, when I was eight years old, the film was so hated by the screenwriter that he went on to make a television series of the same name. I remember seeing this movie in the theater with my mom and older sister though, and absolutely loving it. And I’d now like to argue with Joss Whedon for a bit on this matter: the movie is wonderful.
This movie is, obviously, about vampires and the young woman who is destined to keep them from taking over the world. But it is also a hilarious coming of age story. Yes, Buffy (a young, pre-MAGA Kristy Swanson) is a shallow valley girl whose pre-vampire-slaying dream was to “graduate from high school, go to Europe, marry Christian Slater, and die,” (same, Buffy, same!) but she is also a strong, independent, and funny teen who adapts well to an absurdly dangerous situation. This Buffy, shown through the eyes of a female director, is sexy but not sexed. The fashion sensibilities of 90s L.A. saturate the movie and provide contrast against the gothic chic of its vampires. The world is on the precipice of turning into a blood-sucking hellscape, but it's colorful and fun and sassy. It’s a little like Clueless with vampires.
Despite some strange historical dreams about fighting off men, at the start of the film Buffy seems to have the perfect life that she spends shaking her pompoms and making flirty-eyes with her basketball star boyfriend, then going out shopping with friends. By the film’s end we find Buffy facing off with Lothos (the ancient local vampire king) in her high school gym, wearing a ripped dress and leather jacket, risking her neck to protect her peers from being damned for eternity at their senior dance. Quite the character arc.
What makes this journey so astounding and enjoyable is that it is successfully traversed not due to the help of any of the male characters, but in spite of them and their insistence that she is wrong and that she will fail. The men around her – whether a friend, trainer, or vampire – are a bit bumbling and error-prone. They all lack her natural coordination, strength, instincts, and cleverness. As Buffy bridges a strange new space between valley teen privilege and real-world supernatural responsibility, we see her grow more and more unworried with male expectations or desires. We see her strive instead for her own success and fulfillment, using her strengths and skills in gymnastics, sarcasm, and fashion to her benefit.
This comedic horror film also dabbles in light romance, with Luke Perry playing the love interest Pike, an inept (but handsome) down-on-his-luck young mechanic with an early drinking problem. Buffy gets to know Pike after she and her trainer save him from being turned into a vampire one night. Having realized something awful is going down in their town, Pike spends the rest of the movie falling for Buffy and trying his best to help her take down some of the undead who’ve been feasting on their friends and neighbors. The bond that Buffy & Pike share seems to be centered around an understanding that though Buffy may be wearing a dress, she is the one who calls the shots and saves the day. They accept each other for who they are and there is a mutual respect that serves as the foundation of their blossoming relationship.
The vampires of this film skew younger than usual, the clan having been built up by Lothos with unlucky high school students who remain ready to party and have fun. As they are reborn into their new world of darkness, they maintain some of their personalities and memories of who they were before, still wanting to flirt and play basketball and DJ their senior dance and drop in on their friends for a bite. These vampires are more relatable than they are terrifying. And though there are some scary suck scenes they’re PG-13, so they aren’t the sort that’ll haunt your dreams. The soundtrack isn’t stellar and the special effects aren’t great, but that’s part of the appeal. Buffy the Vampire Slayer the movie was made to appeal to the masses while satirizing genre archetypes. It’s fun and it’s camp.
If all this isn’t enough to make you want to watch the movie with some friends on a Friday night, maybe the surprisingly perfect yet unexpected casting choices will win you over. The film places beautiful teen heartthrobs alongside seasoned actors Donald Sutherland and Rutger Hauer, which provides a serious centering element to this teen movie. It casts Paul Ruebens (aka Pee-wee Herman) in his first post-indecent-exposure-incident role as a long haired, leather jacket wearing henchman to the vampire king who we first see stalking his prey from atop a carousel pony. We also get to view an early Ben Affleck and David Arquette on a big screen, and we are introduced to Hillary Swank – all of whom play teens living the dream (and subsequent nightmare) in the Valley.
One of the best scenes in this film revolves around a chance encounter between Arquette’s and Swanson’s characters, in which he jokingly holds a hot dog out at her as if it were his wiener and she deftly filets it with a nearby butter knife as her friends and Pike watch on in disgust. Seeing a strong, unapologetic female hero fight and stake her way through a world of ridiculous men through the female lens in this way isn’t for everyone. But I think it should be. After all, Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a feminist film that passes the Bechdel test before that test became more widely known a decade later. Likewise, it’s interesting to consider the transition of the film’s star from slicing men down to size as Buffy to later throwing her support behind a man notorious for the phrase “You can do anything. ... Grab 'em by the pussy.” Especially when that bit of pop-cultural info is paired against the end credit joke that sees a high school survivor describe the vampires to the news team as “totally cold animals” then clarify that they must have been young republicans, thus providing a new layer to the mythos of who these blood-sucking villains are.
An entertaining and unique addition to the many films out there about vampires and those who hunt them, Buffy deserves more love than it seems to have gotten in the thirty-plus-years of its existence. Throughout the film, we watch our heroine undergo a reverse makeover as she transitions from a perfectly put together popular teen with an ideal life to a misunderstood outcast who is feared by her peers and is struggling to survive. And through this stripping away of standard ideals of feminine beauty and behavior, a genuinely badass female hero is offered up to an audience. The figurative castration of male power throughout the film is what I imagine, at least in part, Whedon may have disliked about the movie. This Buffy is a depiction of a woman who is unwilling to be controlled or convinced to be anything other than who she is. Buffy is frequently preyed upon and objectified by men (both alive and undead) who view her as weak, stupid, and destined to eventually serve their will. But she out fights and outwits them, eventually choosing to embrace her destiny as the chosen one.
Kelly Jones is a poet and librarian living in New Orleans with their spouse, a cat, and lots of houseplants for said cat to knock over. They're pretty sure they met a vampire once on St. Charles Avenue. You can find out more about them at joneskelly.com.