Buffy the Vampire Slayer turned 20 yesterday, which will make millennials feel as old as the actors who supposedly passed for teenagers back then. When Buffy came out I was eight. At first I was hooked by the horror aesthetic. Later I began to appreciate how it dealt with adolescent crises through supernatural allegory. But only now do I realise how lucky I was to have grown up with an empowered feminist to look up to (and have my first crush on).
For those who didn’t watch Joss Whedon’s show between 1997 and 2003, Buffy Summers (Sarah Michelle Gellar) is a popular cheerleader type who falls in social status after she finds out she is the Chosen One: i.e, the only girl in the world with the power to fight various demons. After being expelled from her old high school ostensibly for killing vampires, she arrives in Sunnydale, which happens to be on a ‘Hellmouth’: somewhere with a higher evil count than anywhere else in California.
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