When Horror Becomes Human: Living Conditions in Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Joss Whedon, the writer-director and creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, thought of his series in terms of “My So-Called Life meet[ing] The X-Files.”¹My So-Called Life was a TV series, aired by ABC for one season only (in 1994–95), which gained a cult status beyond ABC’s imagination. As the title perfectly captures, MSCL is a realistic drama of teenagers coping with the disillusions of everyday life in middle class suburbia. It is set in high school, with 15-year old “average girl” Angela Chase as central figure. While a number of storylines continue throughout the season, each episode deals with a specific moral problem any teenager will recognize. Indeed, the series stands out by doing justice to the complexities of moral issues faced by Angela Chase and her friends on the level of the low—a term Emerson mentioned in the same breath as “the near” and “the common,” as opposed to the sublime and the beautiful (“Self-Reliance”). Three seasons after ABC stopped airing MSCL, Buffy the Vampire Slayer started off on the then new (but by now no longer existing) Warner Brothers network. Like MSCL, Whedon’s series takes an average high school girl for its central protagonist, and all the girl wishes to be is just that: an average high school girl with some success in class, in love, in being a cheerleader, in belonging to her world. But fate frustrates Buffy’s desires time and time again, however modest they may be—and this is where The X-Files creep in. For Buffy has been selected as the latest in a long line of young female monster-fighters.

The X-Files serves as a model in this regard for its conception of the “monster of the week,” which adds suspense and resolution to individual episodes, at the same time allowing each episode to contribute to the long-term story lines. BVS works with an intermediary form as well, which we may call the “monster of the season,” generally referred to as “Big Bad” and successively incarnated in “The Master,” Drusilla, Major Wilkins, Adam, Gloria, Warren, and “The First One.” Along with the monsters of the week—usually metaphors for actual teenage anxieties—these Big Bad creatures from the Hellmouth force wannabe-average-girl Buffy to play the role of the heroine, alienating her from “her own” world in so doing. Following philosopher Stanley Cavell’s assertion in The Claim of Reason that horror indicates “the lower limit of humanity,” we could say that Buffy oscillates between the low and this yet lower limit, noting, however, that only the human can be inhuman, as Cavell has it—and that it often remains to be seen just where that limit is to be drawn, as well as what it signifies (Claim 434).

An instance of this oscillation can be found when Buffy encounters Kathy in season 4, episode 2. In this episode with the telling title “Living Conditions,” Buffy has just entered college, where she shares a single-room dorm with fellow freshman Kathy. Having grown up as an only child, Buffy has difficulties in dealing with a roommate. Kathy, moreover, is a girl so obsessed with order that “she even irons her jeans” (as Buffy exclaims) and so picky about her personal belongings that she writes her name on her eggs in the fridge. As their mutual little annoyances accumulate, Buffy grows impatient with Kathy to the point of no return. This is reached when Kathy disgusts Buffy by clipping her toenails, letting the clippings fall onto the floor. In a hyperbolic sound-montage sequence, we get to see super tight close-ups of toe-nails circling like jet planes through the air. This initiates a sequence of amplified sounds that drive Buffy to the point of explosion, such as Kathy breaking the shell of an egg or playing a love song on the radio. No longer able to concentrate on her homework, Buffy goes to bed with her earplugs. She soon dreams of demons sucking smoke out of her mouth while...