BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER 1992
35%
Directed by Fran Rubel Kuzui
Written by Joss Whedon
Starring Kristy Swanson, Donald Sutherland, Luke Perry, Paul Reubens, Rutger Hauer, Hilary Swank, can you believe the list is this long?, David Arquette, Stephen Root
Synopsis
Cheerleader Buffy must choose between her life as a sheltered high schooler or becoming the latest in a long line of slayers sworn to protect humanity from vampires.
Why We Love It
Let’s just get this out of the way: the late-1990s TV show and this earlier movie share the same name and both center on a blonde high school student slaying vampires, but that’s where the similarities end. And while both projects even have the same writer in Joss Whedon, he has gone on record saying that the movie doesn’t reflect where he wanted to go. “I had written this scary film about an empowered woman, and they turned it into a broad comedy,” he said. “It was crushing.” His seven-season TV show, starring Sarah Michelle Gellar, has been read as a kind of correction. But Whedon might be being a bit hard on the film—and its slayer.
The movie version of Buffy is no slouch. Sure, she’s a well-dressed Valley Girl who thinks that the ozone is something “we gotta get rid of,” but she’s also resourceful, ferocious, and funny. Kristy Swanson, as Buffy, is surrounded by top-tier talent, including the late Luke Perry as Pike, the heartthrob with whom she can share a dance and a stake. Rutger Hauer is here, too, playing to the back row as Lothos. And somehow they got Donald Sutherland to agree to be in the film as Merrick. Swanson’s Buffy asks him for gum in the middle of a stakeout (haha, get it—stakeout?), and he hurls a knife at her head in the girl’s locker room, making them the greatest odd couple of the nineties.
Buffy primed modern audiences for ditzy gals who ended up being not so ditzy after all, most notably Cher in Clueless, which would come three years after this. In a sense, Buffy set the template for an average-seeming young woman who should not be underestimated. And her journey of discovery from ditz to powerhouse slayer—one that parallels more traditional comic-book narratives about geeky guys finding the heroes within—was almost revolutionary when applied to a typical American teenage girl and given a bloody twist.
Hollywood may have interfered with Whedon’s original plan, but it couldn’t snuffle out the power of his message.