At the same time, we have a desire for some kind of loophole and are also drawn to the idea of a romantic soul who finds his life mate, or who will die trying to find the life mate that he will be able to live with for eternity. It’s one of the genres where women and men can watch and get into it on different levels. Guys are looking at it as pure horror and most of the women look at it as a sexual and romantic metaphor. To be taken and made eternal—that’s pretty hot.
MELISSA ROSENBERG
(writer, The Twilight Saga)
The vampire genre means different things to different people. First of all, on a completely surface level, vampires are always beautiful. And it’s also very sexual, the undertones, so that’s sensual if nothing else. In the case of Twilight, for Bella it’s “this guy wants me.” Here’s this incredibly average, gawky, uncomfortable girl, very normal and someone we can all relate to, and here’s this god who knows she is special. I think that fills a fantasy for us. And you still have the titillation that this is someone who, ultimately, is unavailable, so you have the unrequited-love part of it. And there’s also the fantasy of the ultimate connection—you are one, through fluid. I think there’s the romantic tragedy of it, but there’s also the fantasy of it. It’s attractive to be that connected to someone.
CHARLAINE HARRIS
(author, the Southern Vampire book series)
Most people hope that vampires, having had so many years to practice sex, have become super good at it. Everybody, or especially women, I guess, want to be the one—the one that makes a vampire love a human for the first time for a century or decades or however long they’ve been alive. The one that pulls the vampire out of his world and into yours. You want to be that important to somebody, to make them cross boundaries like that.
LEO BRAUDY
The vampire myth is concerned with the relationship between the undead and the living, and the need for blood to survive, the sense of this past world that feeds on the present. These are all very general fears that don’t go away very quickly. Also, of all the monsters, the vampire is the most human, and therefore represents human potential. Nobody is going to become King Kong and you have to be dead to be put together to be Frankenstein. If you’re Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde or the Wolfman, you have no control over your transformation. The idea that you have a secret self inside that you call on in times of danger is really only suitable for the vampire myth.
LAURELL K. HAMILTON
(author, Anita Blake series)
Humans have a tendency to be fascinated by and attracted to what scares them, and nothing scares most people like death. Vampires are dead, but they’re still people, walking and living. Even as a bloodsucking monster, you’re still alive. I think people find that comforting.
CHRIS SARANDON
(actor, Jerry Dandridge, Fright Night)
The thing that appealed to me about playing this vampire, Jerry Dandridge, is that he was totally contemporary. He wasn’t the count of legend or Bram Stoker, but a guy who everybody knew and couldn’t believe was being accused of being a vampire. He isn’t the personification of pure evil that vampires are known to be. Just think about this guy’s problems. On the one hand, you’ve got somebody who’s got something everybody would probably love to have, which is eternal life.
Also, he’s tremendously powerful physically and attractive sexually. What he does, people are, for some reason, attracted to. But at the same time, how would you like to know that if people found out about you, they’d be terrified? That is to be eternal, but spend eternity shunned by any normal kind of society, not being able to form any kind of normal human relationship. To be, in a way, damned to eternity. There was a sense of this guy’s tragedy as well as his attractiveness.
GERAINT WYN DAVIES
(actor, Nick Knight, Forever Knight)
The vampire genre allows things to be explored in a way they frequently aren’t. Forever Knight dealt with big issues. It wasn’t about the fact that the guy was a vampire. It was about the choices that he had to make because of that. It would be the same thing if he was a drug addict or anybody with an addiction. And he was addicted to this lifestyle, this blood—the idea of somebody else’s life so that you can live. It had much more the inner struggle of the individual, so it wasn’t so much about biting people and eyes flashing. It was about the inner turmoil and about growth for someone who had been around for eight hundred years.
TIM MINEAR
(co–executive producer, Angel)
These days vampires are viewed as noble, tortured creatures that are somehow above us. That has a lot to do with Anne Rice. People can relate to feeling apart and sometimes above, yet somehow not part of the rest of the world. I think that’s pretty much a universal feeling, particularly for people going through adolescence. There’s something romantic about not dying. It seems like a way to give a character this huge gift, but then makes it ugly because they don’t really deserve it. It has something to do with alienation. That’s what it is for Angel. Here’s this guy who really wants to be a part of the world, but he can’t be yet.
JULIE BENZ
(actress, Darla)
Vampires are very sexual, very sensual, and they have amazing freedom. The essence of them all is very dark and sexual. They’re sexual, hungry beings. I think everybody has a dark side, and vampires are living the dark side. So we seem to enjoy watching these characters live in the dark without the restraints of society.
STUART FISCHOFF
Certainly the vampire legend has been infected with sex and romance. The whole notion of biting as penetration maintains its sexual allure. With female vampires you get a lot more of the sex connection, also the attraction men have for dangerous sex. Plus the myth of the female using sex to destroy. It has an approach-and-avoidance quality to it. The vampire also interacts with the idea of infection and the transmission of disease. The connection between bloodlust and sex lust is very, very strong, so every time you get some kind of plague, whether it’s AIDS or some other sexually transmitted disease, it kind of feeds right into the notion of infection and from being bitten by the vampire.
STEPHENIE MEYER
(author, The Twilight Saga)
We love to be scared—the horror industry is doing great, but most of the monsters are disgusting. They’re oozing or something, but vampires are the only ones who are dangerous and scary, but at the same time they’re hot. That’s why they’re so popular—there’s both sides to that.
JOSS WHEDON
Any great fantasy has to contain your greatest wish and your darkest fear. The idea of a vampire is someone who is cut off from the rest of humanity, which I think everybody feels like sometimes. He is cut off and shunned, and at the same time exalted. Of all the creatures—and we need our creatures—we’ve created, he is the most exalted. The Phantom of the Opera? Yeah, he can play the piano, but you don’t want to kiss him. The vampire is the person who sees everything, who’s above everything, who’s completely alienated from humans but looks human, can interact with humans, can love like a human. People just relate to that. It’s a myth they want to see themselves in . . . to a degree. Obviously, Buffy is more about Buffy than it is about vampires, but I think there’s a tinge of that there that people can’t get enough of.
The initial setup for the Angel series is that Angel has relocated to Los Angeles, mostly to put some distance between him and Buffy Summers. There he finds new purpose in his life when he meets the half demon Doyle, who serves as a conduit for the Powers That Be and, as such, informs Angel that he’s there to help the helpless. Once Buffy’s Cordelia Chase enters the picture, this new “family” launches Angel Investigations, which has to represent television’s first vampire private detective.
JOSS WHEDON
I saw Angel as the second half, somewhat-more-adult version of the same metaphor as Buffy, which is personal demons as actual demons with horns. But it’s not a high school humiliation, alienation kind of thing. It was more of an adult, “I’m walkin
g in a grownup world,” twentysomething-thirtysomething setting. We dealt a lot with addiction as a metaphor, because that’s Angel. He was sort of a reformed drunk, so he was fighting his way back to something resembling humanity and helping others do the same. We knew it would be a little darker, but it wouldn’t be one of those relentlessly all blue-colored, angsty, “I track a serial killer every week” shows.
MARTI NOXON
We talked a lot about Angel’s mission. Would the setup be something like, “If he saved a hundred souls, he’d get to be human,” or would it not be that literal? Would it be a little looser? We talked about it endlessly, right down to, “Where does he live? What does he drive?” At one point there was some possibility of a car company doing some advertising tie-in and they wanted Angel to drive an SUV [laughs]. So we were saying, “Angel doesn’t drive an SUV, does he?” “No!” “Even if we got free SUVs?” “No, he still doesn’t drive an SUV.” Those are the temptations we faced daily. So there was definitely a struggle, and there were things in the original Angel, the original conception of the show, that were darker than it became.
TIM MINEAR
When you look at the pilot—and I know this was a seminal moment for both Joss Whedon and David Greenwalt—there was the fact that Angel does not save the girl. There’s this big twist where she actually ends up dying like two-thirds of the way through the story. I think that set the tone for the show.
MARTI NOXON
That was absolutely the point. In this world and this universe, there was a greater mystery, and Angel’s place in it wasn’t always going to be clear. But then he had to sort of trust that he was doing the right thing and that there was a greater good he was serving. In fact, he did stop the evil vampire in the pilot and helped Cordelia, who probably would have been killed by him. That was one of the places where Joss and David were thinking in a fashion that made people so intrigued with what they did, because you really didn’t know what was going to happen.
TIM MINEAR
The thing you didn’t see was written in the script. Angel goes in, finds her dead body, cradles her, and sees her blood on his hand. He lifts his hand and, I think, he actually put his finger in his mouth. Originally that was, for Joss and David, the point of the episode; that this guy is really on the edge. He’s struggling. But that moment just didn’t work, and we ended up cutting it from the episode. It was dark enough that he didn’t save the girl. I don’t think you needed him licking her dead body. It was very cool, but that’s often what happens. The thing that you thought was the point of the story ends up excised at the end.
DAVID BOREANAZ
(actor, Angel)
In the beginning, Angel was an analogy to everyday living. I think when you wake up in the morning and look at yourself in the mirror, you see yourself, but in there are these fears and these demons that somehow are sleeping or hidden in your past. When you walk out that door and face people, you don’t really know how people are, they’re touch and go, and those demons and fears will come out. So the idea was that I would be fighting those demons and it would be a fight for humanity; how many souls can I save in order to save my own? And Angel as a character is very complex, because he does have the opportunity to delve into dangerous personalities at times, but he knows how to keep that at bay; he has a soul.
MARTI NOXON
What’s interesting to me about Angel is that it’s not just a perfect moment of happiness that trips him up and he’s bad again. One of the things we wanted to explore on the series was the idea that there’s a part of him that’s very dark, and if those impulses get triggered and pushed too far, he’s capable of going back to the dark side. That was always real interesting to me.
STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT
(supervising producer, Angel)
There are a lot of elements to Angel that are appealing. One is the brooding antihero. You’ve got a vampire with a soul trying to atone for his crimes. That’s just one of those mythical stories that people love. That you almost crave. Luke Skywalker standing on Tatooine, watching the twin suns set . . . God, if only there were a scene that approached that kind emotional resonance in any of the Star Wars prequels. But it’s that kind of mythical storytelling that I think really resonates on a subconscious level. Besides that, it’s a show that has humor, action, horror. It’s got a blend of everything. And deep painful drama, and at the time it was hard to find another show on TV that had all of those elements and that could shift gears in the middle of a deep, emotional scene where you’ll suddenly have a funny line, and vice versa.
TIM MINEAR
In the episode “She,” there’s a moment during a party at Cordelia’s apartment when a woman asks Angel to dance and he imagines himself doing the dorkiest dance anyone could imagine and gracefully declines. Joss had been talking about Boreanaz’s funny dance. Actually, I put it into the script for “Sense and Sensitivity” at one point where he said, “I feel so deeply now, the only way I can express myself is through interpretive dance,” and I had him do this thing. It was really funny, but Joss thought it was too much. Plus, we wanted to save it until it was just right. So we put it into “She.” Here’s this guy who looks like this, and he’s a complete social retard. We had a lot of success playing that aspect of the character.
DAVID GREENWALT
(executive producer / co-creator, Angel)
We’d wanted to do the dance for years on Buffy. It was, like, “Maybe this is Xander’s imagination of the way he sees Angel dancing,” but Joss just filed the idea away. When we were writing, “She,” he said, “Do a party scene, have a girl ask him to dance, and do his fantasy of what it would look like.” To me that’s pretty terrific writing, because it’s fun and entertaining, but it also makes a point about why Angel doesn’t mix with people. The normal reason is because he doesn’t want to drink their blood, no happiness and all of that shit. But also he doesn’t want to look like a goofball. You don’t expect to see your hero even in a fantasy doing that, yet it’s on point. It’s emotionally correct and funny as shit.
KELLY A. MANNERS
(producer, Angel)
I think it was much easier to sell Angel than Buffy, because the characters had already been established. The network knew what they were going to get. Of course Angel went a different direction. A vampire with a soul opens up a detective agency—it’s kind of humorous to think back. We shot our presentation in three days, and it sold the show. We didn’t spend a lot of time and money on it. It was a twenty-minute quickie, and that’s all the network needed to see, and we were on our way.
DAVID BOREANAZ
I didn’t see the Buffy connection as either a burden or a problem. I just saw that they were going to be compared, because Angel came out of Buffy. There was really no way to control that, and I didn’t look to control any of that. I saw it as a blessing to be able to have the show when Buffy came out and had a character evolve into its own show was remarkable, and very fortunate for me.
THOMAS P. VITALE
(executive vice president, programming and original movies, Syfy and Chiller)
What made Angel so fascinating is that at first blush it seems like a very straightforward spin-off from Buffy . . . just take the general premise of Buffy and some of the recurring characters, add in some new people, change the city, and have a new show. But Angel was much more than that. Angel was a show that stood up on its own. Although Angel probably won’t be considered “important” like Buffy, it was a very good show. In terms of audience appeal, I think that Angel ultimately appealed primarily to a core genre audience, whereas Buffy’s appeal transcended audience distinctions between genre and nongenre viewers.
KEITH SZARABAJKA
(actor, Holtz)
I actually liked Angel better than Buffy. I thought it was darker and more interesting, you know? I always thought Buffy was a little tongue-in-cheek, whereas with Angel, while there was this certain sort of winking quality to it, it still felt that if vampires were real, Angel would have
been real. It was sort of like The Equalizer with fangs.
JOSS WHEDON
We didn’t have to do an actual pilot, because we had an order for thirteen and because David Greenwalt and I were both making Buffy, there was no way we could shoot something for pilot season. So the idea was always just to shoot the presentation and then go straight into production.
DAVID GREENWALT
Buffy and Angel were among the best things that ever happened in my paltry life. I came to TV late, in my ’40s. I had been sick of movies and determined to make it in television. This was the first really successful thing. Well, I was on The Commish, but Buffy changed a lot of things anyway. And three years or so into that show, Joss walks into my office one day and he says, “What do you think about spinning off Angel into his own show and doing it together with me?” By then I was smart enough to say, “Uh, yes, please.”
JOSS WHEDON
We were terrified pretty much 24-7 during that time; we just kept working and working. David worked the most on Angel, I worked the most on Buffy, and we sort of supported each other. We were constantly going back to each other’s office and stuff. But in terms of the breaking of stories and the editing and all that, that all happened together. The staffs from both shows knew each other and, so there was a lot of cross-currents. We just kept it one big concept instead of two totally separate ones.
KELLY A. MANNERS
We didn’t mind being the child of Buffy. Buffy was mother ship and we all realized that. We had the same show runners, so we knew what we were in for. I can’t tell you there were huge hurdles. The only huge hurdle was every time we accomplished an impossible show, Joss would see it was accomplished and he’d raise the bar on the next one. I’d say, “Joss, pretty soon we’re not going to be able to pole vault over it.” “Well, you said that on the last one and you guys got it done.”
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