What is there left to say about Buffy the Vampire Slayer? I got into the franchise after the TV series had ended, but only just, in a roundabout manner. In short, there was a demo for the video game adaptation of the show on a disc that came with the Official XBox Magazine, the subscription to which was bundled with the system when I got it for my fifteenth birthday. This led to obtaining the movie on VHS at a flea market within the following year and finding the DVDs of the first few seasons at the GameStop on Essen Lane shortly thereafter, starting a lifelong love for the slayer and her pals. I’m currently in the midst of a rewatch of the show right now, and even under great duress I could not calculate the number of rewatches I’ve had. Normally, people who enjoy the show don’t care much for the movie (or vice versa), but I love them both; I couldn’t begin to tell you how many times I’ve watched this film any more than I could tell you how many times I’ve watched the show.
We get a brief intro set in “Europe” in “The Dark Ages” that establishes the lore that vampires walk among us and that the only one with the strength and skill to face them is a girl called to be the Slayer, who is guided in her craft by the Watcher. We cross-cut from the medieval Slayer lifting an ornate stake into the air to a pom-pom held aloft by airheaded cheerleader Buffy (Swanson). We find ourselves in Southern California in “The Lite Ages,” where Buffy and her clique are a softer version of the Heathers, whose only concerns are shopping, dances, boyfriends, and curfews. After a chance encounter with a couple of broke mechanics named Benny (David Arquette) and Pike (Luke Perry), Buffy meets Merrick (Donald Sutherland), who introduces himself as her Watcher and tells her of her destiny, much to her “eww.” Elsewhere, sensing that the Slayer has come into her powers, the elder vampire Lothos (Rutger Hauer) arrives in Los Angeles with his flunky Amilyn (Paul Reubens) in tow to begin rebuilding his vampire coven. Amilyn attacks Pike and Benny one night; Pike is rescued by Merrick, but Benny isn’t so lucky, showing up at Pike’s place the following night floating around and attempting to convince Pike to join him, Salem’s Lot style. Meanwhile, Buffy is convinced to accompany Merrick to a graveyard when he knows details of her dreams, which he reveals to be memories of past Slayers. When a vampire emerges from the ground, her instincts kick in and she defeats it with ease. The two begin training, with Merrick warning her that she must keep her identity a secret from the vampires, and Buffy also strikes up an unlikely romance with Pike. Finally being challenged by a father figure while also finding something to love in a man she would have previously been too vapid to consider because of his working class background, Buffy grows as a person without losing the things that make her unique, and it may be just enough to give her the edge over Lothos despite so many previous Slayers dying at his hands.
In writing about the film as a companion piece to All Cheerleaders Die, Brandon identified Buffy as “Clueless before Clueless, if Clueless were a Hammer Horror,” and that’s spot on. Buffy, like Cher after her, is the perfect 90s heroine: an archetypically ditzy girl with seemingly nothing going on upstairs whose apparent vapidity and cluelessness obscure a kind heart and a healthy intelligence that simply doesn’t present in a traditional, measurable way. When given the chance to see beyond the rim of the literal and metaphorical valley, they demonstrate a wealth of character. Buffy’s relationship with Merrick is quite charming, especially in contrast to the apathetic neglect that her parents demonstrate, and Pike serves as a nice contrast to Buffy’s boyfriend Jeffrey, who, instead of defending Buffy against a sexist remark from one of his friends when he asks to “borrow” her, declines on the grounds that he’d “get her dirty.”
Although the film and the series are narratively aligned in the broad strokes (the events of the film are basically canon, with the one major change being that the film’s screenplay featured Buffy burning the gym down during her final fight, which was cut from the movie for budget reasons but treated as canonical in the show), they’re very different tonally. Buffy the series is funny, but it’s a supernatural drama first and foremost, with the comedy being an innate part of its charm but not what first comes to mind when one thinks about it. Buffy the film is a comedy from the ground up, starting with the gag that a Valley Girl with a name like “Buffy” might have a serious destiny, fated to slay the vampires that start to spring up all over Los Angeles. This gives the film the chance to tell jokes on several levels, from the lowbrow comedy Buffy cutting the hot dog that Benny uses as a phallus to mock her, to the more conceptual humor that arises from someone like Buffy having a special destiny, to the slapstick of Paul Reubens being staked and dying very, very slowly. One of my favorite jokes features the vapid teens trying to come up with a dance theme that’s socially aware, deciding on environmentalism but having trouble with landing it conceptually, coming up with the catchphrase “don’t tread on me” before realizing that you “kind of have to” tread on the earth. Later, the banner at the dance reads “Hug the World,” which is so comically meaningless that it’s hard not to snort. It’s good stuff all around.
It’s hard to watch the film now knowing how mentally unwell Swanson has become in recent years, not to mention that a film that’s barely thirty years old has also lost so many members of its cast, with Perry and Hauer passing in 2019, Reubens in 2023, and Donald Sutherland in 2024. I don’t think that any of them were defined by their roles in this film, all having greater success elsewhere, but I still think of Sutherland’s role in this when I picture him in my mind, and I may be the only person on earth who thinks about Amilyn before Pee-Wee Herman when Reubens is mentioned. Nonetheless, that’s not what makes this movie an unintentional period piece, as this is a perfect little time capsule of the 1990s, a snapshot of a time when “Buffy, the vampire slayer” was a conceptual novelty and not a far-reaching media empire (this year’s failed reboot notwithstanding). The film is full of cameos from actors who would go on to have a much bigger cultural footprint: Stephen Root as the principal of Hemery High, Hilary Swank as the scheming Heather Duke to Buffy’s (sweet) Heather Chandler, and even a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it appearance from babyfaced Ben Affleck as a member of a rival school’s basketball team. The best time to have seen this movie was when you were a kid or a teenager and you watched it three times a day for two weeks during summer vacation, but the second-best time to watch it is now.
-Mark “Boomer” Redmond
