This is the first in a new series of blogs charting why the 1997-2003 TV show 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer is so awesome. It will look at things like how Buffy effected women on TV, the horror genre, God and whatever else I think of. This first one is about the very first scene. I couldn't find it on Youtube to let you see it so watch it on project free TV or some such.
Buffy opens to Sunnydale High School at night, it is dark and eerie music plays (kind of sounds like crickets at first moving to more ominous deeper sounds later).
The camera takes the viewer down some of Sunnydale High's corridors. It passes the library (which will soon become the focal point of the show as it is where Buffy and her friends hang out and is also home to the 'Hellmouth', a portal to another realm inhabited by monsters once banished from earth).
The camera next brings us through a science/history classroom and over to the window, where a dark haired teenager breaks in with his blonde girlfriend in tow.
She is in a Catholic school girl uniform. She asks if it is a good idea to break in, he says of course it is. They walk into the corridor and she asks if this is his school. He is a graduate and wants to bring her to the roof of the gym as 'you can see the whole town from up there.'
She doesn't want to go. She sounds a little scared, perhaps of him or perhaps of being caught breaking into the school.
They are about to kiss when the blonde girl hears a noise and turns and says, 'what was that?' sounding a little jumpy. Leather jacket and mustard t-shirt boy tells her it's nothing, trying to calm her fears.
She still thinks it is something. He moves from her and looks down various corridors and calls 'hello' almost in a singsong voice. It's at this point you begin to feel worried for the blonde girl, they normally die first in movies (so either he is a vampire and will kill her or she has heard a vampire and it will kill them both).
He says, "see, there's nobody here."
She asks if he is sure.
"Yes, I'm sure," he comforts her, sounding a little annoyed that she is so scared.
The blonde girl at this point is looking down a corridor with him behind her. She says ok and turns around.
Snarling her face has distorted and her incisors elongated. She is the vampire. She bites his neck and they both fall to the ground as the opening title sequence begins playing.
Okay, so to some of you that sounds horrible and I apologise if it does. This scene though is fantastic. It turns the entire horror genre on its head and sets the tone for the entire series (which ran from March 1997-May 2003). In this scene we see a tough looking guy, who is clearly trouble as he leads the poor, innocent, Catholic school girl into a school. She gets scared and he comforts her, even if a little mockingly. Then, knowing they are alone, the blonde girl (and not the tough, trouble guy) turns out to be the monster. Up until this point the little blonde girls were normally (if not always) the victims of monsters. Buffy opens with the blonde girl that dies being the one that does the killing. The show continues on a similar thread when it is revealed that Buffy herself is a blonde girl, another damsel in distress that should get killed early on. This time though, the blonde girl is the hero.
Joss Whedon [the creator of Buffy, Angel, Firefly (Serenity), Dollhouse and writer of Toy Story, Alien, Cabin in the Woods and the Avengers (as well as scenes in Iron Man 2, Captain America and Thor)] saw horror films and other filmed mediums and thought that women always played a lesser role and often were seen merely as cannon fodder, someone to be killed off. He didn't like this and wanted to turn it around and surprise people by the 'damsel in distress' turning out to be the hero. Buffy was first called 'Rhonda the Immortal Waitress' because Joss loved the idea of someone who seemed so normal, with a normal job, that should die when facing down a monster, turning out to be the hero.
The first scene, and the statement it made to movie makers, TV makers and perhaps women in general (that women in a show or movie aren't just back up characters or there for sex appeal, but they can be the lead, they can be the hero) is the first thing that makes Buffy shpiffing.
No comments:
Post a Comment