SARAH LEMELMAN
It is perhaps fitting that Xander (a male) believes the Scooby Gang and the Potentials have saved the world, while Willow (a female) corrects him and asserts that the group has changed the world. They may have defeated the First and destroyed Sunnydale’s Hellmouth, but the most important feat the group accomplished was the sharing of Buffy’s power to all Potential Slayers throughout the world. After seven seasons and 144 episodes, Buffy the Vampire Slayer concludes with its most potent message: girls do not need to be afraid but, instead, should be confident in who they are and always stand up for themselves.
JOSS WHEDON
The fact of the matter is that I’ve always identified with female heroes and had trouble finding them. It was great the first time I was watching and realized, “Buffy, she’s my hero.” That’s how I want the show to be remembered. As for some of her sillier outfits and cheesier effects . . .
KELLY A. MANNERS
(producer, Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
When a crew latches on to a show that’s successful, they never want to move on. Because you’re not out looking for your next show and shooting thirteen episodes and getting canceled and it’s a revolving door. When you create those relationships with the crew, it becomes a great big family.
My dad did Route 66 and my brother, sister, and I traveled with him the first season. By the second season it was twenty-seven kids from the crew traveling from state to state with that show. And then with Nora, who was Shirley Temple’s tutor, we’d go to school three hours a day in bars and that was another real family. Same thing with Buffy and when I did Dukes of Hazzard. That was a family. Now the new thing is if you get a second season, you’re lucky, it seems. With the new cable season, it’s ten and out. It’s not the same. The business has changed.
SETH GREEN
(actor, Oz)
I actually miss arriving at my trailer every morning to find that David Boreanaz had already pooped in it, without fail. It was always that funny thing where I would arrive, and he would be coming out of my door and be, like, “Left something for you, buddy!”
JOSS WHEDON
I do have visions of spinning the show off into a Star Trek-kian film franchise, but I also have visions of invading Poland, so we’ll see which one I’ll do. I want the show to be remembered as a consistently intelligent, funny, emotionally involving entertainment that subtly changed the entire world—or a small portion of pop culture. Enlightenment is the slowest process this side of evolution. Three steps forward, nine steps back. It’s very hard to have come up in the ’70s, to be raised by a feminist and then live through the Reagan era, and now God help us.
Feminism, which hopefully will become an obsolete term by the time I’m dead, is a really important thing. Not just feminism, but antimisogyny. Changing the way that people think about women and the way they think about themselves is what I want to do with my life. There are other things I have to say, there are other things I want to do and stories I want to tell, but that’s the most important thing to me. If Buffy made the slightest notch in any of pop culture in that direction, well that’s pretty damn good.
PART TWO
ANGEL
“Fangs, don’t fail me now.”
BACK IN BLACK
“He’s a shadow, a faceless champion of the hapless human race . . .”
Spin-offs have been a part of television for decades, producers and networks viewing them as opportunities to expand a brand or franchise. Norman Lear made a staple of it with spin-offs of the popular CBS sitcom, All in the Family, including Maude, Rhoda, Good Times, The Jeffersons, Gloria, Archie Bunker’s Place, and, later, 704 Hauser; while Garry Marshall used Happy Days as a launching pad for Laverne and Shirley, Mork and Mindy, and Joanie Loves Chachi, among others.
Sometimes, these shows exploit the original by attempting to wring a few more dollars out of a successful idea (AfterM*A*S*H, anyone?); other times, a combination of commerce and creativity, the desire to keep a good thing going, works hand in hand with an attempt to offer viewers something that is new yet redolent of the mother-ship series.
Angel falls into the latter category, taking a popular supporting character from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and giving him a series of his own. At the time, this particular spin-off was greeted with some skepticism; more than a few fans wondered how exactly this vampire with a soul was going to serve as the centerpiece of his own show, given that he had mostly served as a love interest for Buffy for three seasons of vampire slaying.
In the end, Angel turned out to have a lot in common with two other spin-offs that did connect with the audience. The first was Frasier, spawned from one of the most beloved sitcoms of the 1980s, Cheers. Kelsey Grammer’s Frasier Crane was a supporting character in an ensemble series, and, with all due respect to the actor, there was nothing that seemed to scream that this character needed to branch off on his own. In fact, if there was going to be a Cheers spin-off, a more likely one would have been focused on Cliff Clavin and Norm Peterson, the barflies who arguably provided even more laughs than Frasier ever had. of course, anyone who doubted the possibilities were ultimately surprised as Frasier became a fully fleshed-out character on a show that had the same eleven-year run as its predecessor. In that regard, Angel was in good company (despite only running five years compared with Buffy’s seven).
The other close cousin to Angel was Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, the cult spin-off of Star Trek: The Next Generation. That Star Trek series, the first to take place on a space station rather than a starship, was in a very different setting (just as Angel took place in Los Angeles as opposed to Buffy’s demon-infested Sunnydale). Additionally, both Deep Space Nine and Angel were originally designed to be stand-alone shows, each episode expected to have a beginning, middle, and an end to make it easier for an audience to tune in at any point and not feel lost. But both quickly discovered that there was an inherent creative need for serialization and began to embrace that means of storytelling. The resulting growing tapestry gave birth to two series that predicted the very nature of binge television and that creatively equaled if not surpassed the shows that gave birth to them—a fact not always recognized by the critics or the larger audiences that viewed the shows that spawned them.
As a character, Angel himself represents the sympathetic vampire, member of the undead with a conscience, whose existence is haunted by reflections of what he is and the misery he has wrought over the centuries. At the time of the show’s original run, he was far from the medium’s first such representation, following a long road of the vampire’s evolution from genuine creature of the night to the more broody, angst-driven variety.
LEO BRAUDY
(film historian; professor of English, University of Southern California)
In film, all of the other genres—from Westerns to musicals—come and go, but horror seems to have a perpetual life, despite, or perhaps because of, its focus on the dead. The images (of horror), the motifs, the characters, and the plot structures have a greater metamorphic variety than some of the other genres. They can be refitted to new historical situations.
STUART FISCHOFF
(media psychologist)
When Universal made Dracula, [the] character that had a certain human element to it, an element that would remain throughout the 1930s and ’40s. What you find is that the monsters pre-1950s always had a reason for their monsterness. They always had a side of them that was sympathetic. They murdered for life-serving or life-saving reasons. Dracula had to take blood to live. Frankenstein was misunderstood. Wolfman was tormented by his demons.
In the ’50s I think you hit all of the nuclear concerns—the effects of the radioactive fallout—and then from the 1960s and beyond the monsters are killing for no other reason than they wanted to kill. I think there was this major shift in how monsters in general and vampires in particular were seen prior to the ’70s and subsequent to the’70s. I think that reflects the change in sensibility of our culture. It may well come out of
the post-Holocaust, Second World War idea that human beings can be so awful and death can be so inexplicable, random, and capricious.
Then, of course, when you get into the ’70s and ’80s, we lived with drive-by shootings, gangs, and things like that. You might make the point that in earlier times, vampires and their ilk were seen in the background of a just world and that subsequently the world was chaotic, death could strike you at any moment, and life was unfair. Vampires in that era reflected that. They just killed.
GUILLERMO DEL TORO
(executive producer, The Strain)
I am fed up with vampires being tortured Victorian heroes. I just don’t like the whole concept. I think vampirism is essentially sucking someone else’s blood, which can be dealt with as an addiction or in so many other ways which are interesting. I just want vampires to be scary again; the concept of being drained of your blood by something to be scary again, as opposed to a romantic interlude.
With that Victorian era, where the westernization of the vampire myth occurs in the nineteenth century, the scariest part of this was that they would rob you of your life and turn you into something not human. I think that most people imagine vampires in a romantic way, and most women fantasize about being drained by Angel or Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt, but nobody is going to fantasize about being drained by creatures.
I am fascinated by the several ways that you can read the same phenomenon [vampirism]. It can be a sexual, erotic thing. It can have a purely addictive element to it. There is a political element in it. There is also the more basic, more fun elements of the monster. There are so many takes you can have on that myth that are fascinating.
STEVE NILES
(creator/writer, 30 Days of Night)
The appeal of vampires for me is that I can’t stand them. It had just gotten to the point where vampires and Dracula and the whole thing had just been turned into something silly, which is a tendency of people in general. We like to tame our fears, so we start with Nosferatu and we end with Count Chocula. And then on TV you’ve got Buffy and teenage girls dating vampires. The romanticized notion was taking over vampires, and they were just becoming human, really. They were like humans who had to drink blood once in a while. And so basically they were just not scary to me at all. So we thought we needed to figure out a way to make them scary again, and I said, “There’s nothing more frightening than an intelligent creature who looks at you as nothing but food,” so we started with that. And then I started to think, “Land sharks,” and I thought that was where we wanted to get back to. There it is, no argument. It’s all about food, and the vampire would look at us with as much mercy as we look at cows.
JOHN BADHAM
(director, Dracula [1979])
If you look at the character of Dracula as an extremely evil person, it doesn’t mean that he has to be ugly. When you think about many of the so-called evil temptations of the world that we face, they are quite often packaged in extremely attractive ways. That’s one of their appeals; a successful evil is the one that we think is terrific. You can say, for instance, cigarettes are in this category. “I smoke because I want to be cool and I want to be admired and people who smoke cigarettes look cool. Oh yeah, it says I’m going to die, but I don’t take that seriously.” Alcohol, drugs, wild, wild women—you can pick your poison. But, usually, any evil that is successful comes in a very attractive package. That’s the seduction of it.
LEO BRAUDY
The romanticized vampire was implicit in the beginning, because the vampire was always a kind of Byronic figure. The vampire myths really start long before Dracula and start to become popular in English and German fiction at the beginning of the nineteenth century. And the figure of Byron pretended to be himself and wrote about the solitary person on the moors with this horrible hurt inside. That just went right into the vampire myth. So a romanticized element has always been there as a potential part of it.
JONATHAN FRID
(actor, Barnabas Collins, Dark Shadows[1966–71])
I loved to play horror for horror’s sake. Inner horror. I never thought I created fear with the fang business of Barnabas. I always felt foolish doing that part of it. The horror part I liked was “the lie.” There’s nothing more horrible than looking someone in the eyes who’s telling you a lie and you know it. Somehow that scares me more than anything. In terms of the theater, I liked the inner drama rather than the outward manifestation. An inner conflict or emotional confrontation is more of a drama to me.
That’s why with Barnabas there were many scenes I was thrilled to do and why the show came alive so many times for me. Barnabas’s lie, that he was pretending to be something that he wasn’t, motivated me. That pretense was something that the actor playing Barnabas had to remember all the time. He got the lust for blood every once in a while, but always what preyed on his mind was the lie. And of course it played right into my lie as an actor. I was lying that I was calm and comfortable in the studio, just as Barnabas was lying that he was the calm and comfortable cousin from England. He wasn’t at all. He was a sick, unbelievable creep that the world didn’t know about.
LEO BRAUDY
That lie is appealing and certainly appealing to teenagers, who always feel they have that secret self inside that nobody appreciates. It’s an empowerment thing. What makes me unique, is it the dark side or something else?
RON SPROAT
(writer, Dark Shadows)
Part of it is because Jonathan played a duality and had kind of a lost quality as well. He said originally, and I think he was right, “Don’t write the evil; I’ll play it that way. I look that way.” He also said that he’d done Richard III and he was astounded by the reviews at the time, because they said he was the most evil Richard. He said, “I was playing for sympathy.” So he suggested that we write against the evil and he would play against it, which would make it more interesting. That’s what we did and I thought it worked.
BARRY ATWATER
(actor, Janos Skorzeny, The Night Stalker)
I just figured Skorzeny was a guy who needs blood. I figured he can’t be very different from a guy who needs heroin, who’s an addict. I’ve never taken heroin and never intended to, but what I heard about it is that a guy has to have it. If Skorzeny didn’t have blood, what would happen to him? It must be really hell not to have blood. It’s not a question of being immoral or cruel. It’s a question of, “I’ve got to have it. It’s too bad if people die because of it.” I felt the people who were chasing me were my enemies. They were the “heavies,” the “villains.”
FRANK LANGELLA
(actor, Dracula)
I never wanted Dracula to strike terror from the first day of rehearsal of the play to the making of the [1979] film. I didn’t see him as a character who went around with long fingernails and hollow eyes and fangs and all that stuff. It didn’t interest me to play him that way, because it would have just been repeating a tried and true genre, which everybody knows works. I wanted him to be somewhat vulnerable, hopefully somewhat neurotic, and occasionally not sure of his territory.
I wanted him to be some kind of man who had come to some relative peace in life with his circumstances. He had to exist for blood, but he didn’t necessarily spend all his waking hours in pursuit of it or in some kind of horrific guise. So I wouldn’t be upset if people said I changed the character, because that’s why I wanted to do it. It would have been absolutely of no interest to me to have done it in the Hammer way with fangs and snarling and all of that stuff. I just decided to play him as a mortal man for a very long time, and slowly began to add the curse. I found it fascinating to work on him in this way instead of as a predator.
JOSS WHEDON
(executive producer / cocreator, Angel)
For my generation, before David Boreanaz, there has been one truly vulnerable vampire, and that was Frank Langella. He was the standard as far as I was concerned. He was younger; he was cooler. I saw him on stage before I saw the movie.
That, plus Int
erview with the Vampire, which really laid it home—the alienated human and how he deals with life as opposed to the bloodsucking thing in the shadows—and really brought it up to date. I don’t know if there’s any stopping it. They lend themselves to The Wild Bunch with Near Dark, and they lend themselves to futuristic movies as well. They fit. There is always a dark corner with a beautiful and frightening person there.
BEN CROSS
(actor, Barnabas Collins, Dark Shadows [1991])
I think one of the first things that might be appealing about vampires is that the way women might view a vampire and a vampire tale is somewhat different from the way a man would. We reached a certain point in the series where we simply had to go back to the past and find out exactly what went on. And so we did go back and saw Barnabas as this really nice guy. Very, very happy family. And it was really like a cautionary tale for married men. He actually had a fling with the wrong person. And the phrase of hell having no fury like a woman scorned was absolutely true, because, in fact, she came from hell. And so, in a sense, he makes a human mistake that a lot of people, if they’re honest, have actually made. He regrets it and then becomes a victim and a vampire. So, in a sense, he was as much a victim of his own condition in the same way as the people he found himself biting.
MARTI NOXON
(consulting producer, Angel)
Part of the reason that someone like Anne Rice is so popular is that she was coming up about the same time as our awareness of AIDS and blood diseases grew, and fears of sex and blood were intermingled. It probably gave her work a little more poignancy and gravity. But because the myth has been around so much longer than that, the appeal has so much to do with our longing to escape death, and so much to do with our knowledge that that can’t happen, because the cost of this would be to be some kind of monster.
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