Before Vampire Diaries, there was Buffy The Vampire Slayer (1997-2003). The show made it so big that it gathered a loyal troupe of fans whose avidness further inspired novels and comic books. These people love the show even today, and there are still lots of conventions around the world to cele🦹brate this show. Even to people wh♔o've never seen the show, Buffy has a familiar ring to it. It was one of the first teen shows to tackle occult themes in earnest, relatively speaking.
In this list, we hope to wrestle with the show’s dark moments. These include cast-related incidents, concept origins, unnecessary behaviors on the part of select people, and creepy concepts and characterizations used over the seasons. In other words, it’s best to stop associati🦋ng ‘dark’ solely with grim and dep༺lorable things. It also refers to those things not often spoken about or received in good faith.
Buffy has been a super popular show, much like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Supernatural is today. This article in no way reflects hate on the writer’s part, but rather an open-minded look at the ‘darker’ side of these shows; based on a refreshed definition. Sometimes it's important to take a step back and reexamine a loved TV show. You might notice things that you've never seen before. It's also possible that maybe, just maybe, you'🍒ll never look at it the same way again.
20 🐎 Gellar Yells Helter-Skelter
This point might not seem as dark. But think about it. In a show that’s been around forever, the cast and crew are practically family. No♍w imagine this: you are going to be evicted from your home. One member knows it, and she blabs it to the press before letting you in on it. Feels like a betrayal to me. This is precisely what happened when Sarah Michelle Gellar went to Entertainment Weekly with the premature announcement that Buffy would be no more after season 7.
Nobody saw this coming.
She even roped in the show’s creator and said that they were in agreement on this. Aside from fan-shock, imagine the cast being 🦄jolted out of their minds, knowing they’re out of a job. They heard it all on EW. It put a serious strain on their relationship with Gellar. This move was performed rather gracelessly.
19 🅷 The Sly Switch
What a lot of Buffy fans might know is that the show could have been very different in a big way. Joss Whedon's original pilot of the show had a different actor in the role of Willow, who was then switched out for a better-looking performer to sell the first episode. This is what happened to Riff Regan in the debut episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, before Alyson Hannigan was cast in Willow൲’s role.
In the current climate of subjugation (one might argue that this has been going on for much longer), we can’t help but feel that the darkness of judgment, isolationism, bigotry, deliberate advertising, and female dis-empowerment play💯ed quite a loud ditty in this otherwise small case. It’s not a matter of casting preference, but more a case of intentional enhancement that drives ꦯa stake through our heart.
18 The Empathetic Vampire 🐻
Season 6 was a rough one for the show. It’s Sarah Michelle Gellar’s most hated🦩 season, owing in large part to the way the writers rewrote her character. James Marsters (who plays Spike) also found that it changed him on a deep level. This is in reference to the bathroom scene where he sees red. According to an interview he gave with AV Club, “I was curled up in a fe𝄹tal position in between takes... hardest day of my professional career... hardest days of my life.”
If a scene can leave an actor feeling raw, something must have happened behind the scenes.
Marsters was feeling disgusted about the way the writers took to the season. This scene was based on a writer's real experience in college, and it was her most vulnerable moment. ꧒To say James was uncomfortable with this scene would be an understatement.
17 🌠 To Kiss Or Not To Kiss
Dark ideas are not only about occultism or crazy scandals; they also include modern-day intolerance. In this case, we see prejudice concerning the same-gender relationship between Willow and Tara. Outlooks were admittedly different back in 2000, but that’s still no excuse for a TV network (in this case WB) to declare NO to a scene involvin🍎g a harmless love interest angle.
Instead of simply editing out the kiss scene, Joss Whedon employed a witchcraft metaphor to🦋 describe it. The kiss was eventually showcased halfway through season 5, and Whedon insisted that it go on-air or he walks. This was a great move, as it ended up working. This was one of the first same-gender kisses on network televisionꦍ. Later on, the show also became the first network television show to air a lesbian scene. We can only imagine how insulting this might have seemed to select fandoms.
16 The Fa🃏cts Behind The Fangs
The vampires in Buffy look like ordinary people with only their teeth and bone structure mutated. There’s a reason behind this, and it has nothing to do with technical limitations. Whe⛎don employed a psychological ploy, meaning he intentionally wanted viewers to see that a normal person can become a vampire rather quickly and revert back to normalcy. This, he surmised, would give viewers chills. He also wanted there to be an obvious distinction between people and monsters so Buffy didn't come across as dissociative and anti-social.
The forehead-to-nose prosthetic that comprised the show’s vampire-image involved delicate makeup work; an hour and a half’s worth.
Whedon really drilled in an importan▨t message here, and humanizing the vampires certainly did make them more unsettling to viewers.
15 From The Pages Of History ♑
The writers relied upon actua🌠l vampire lore to keep the show believable. They kept one foot in history and another in myth. Joss Whedon decided to get rid of the whole flying angle, as well as the part where vampires can turn into bats. He felt it was old-fashioned and silly. The truth of the matter was that the show did not have sufficient funding 💖to use these CG-reliant moments. But the series still holds up, regardless.
Lore-based concepts that were applied include the idea that vampires (being soul-less) don’t leave reflections on mirrors and that they can be destroyed by a stake driven through their hearts. Their weaknesses include substances like garlic, holy water, and fire. The🌳y cannot enter a residence unless invited inside by the owner (we believe that this particular point was heavily employed in Vampire Diaries).
14 A Ghastly Villain 🐻
The Gentlemen are one of the more unforgettable villains, not to mention one of the most genuinely blood-curdling. They give off a strong Victorian vibe, with several frightful layers of personality. It’s remar﷽kable to learn that Joss Whedon came up with the idea for them in a dream that he had. He later sketched out and presented this to his team, particularly the show’s special effects department. The make-up guys then worked to make it happen.
Viewers got a set of horrifying villains in one of the darkest fantasy series of its time.
Relying on the talent of actors and artists who have performed other 𒁃creature-related work (one of whom included Doug Jones), Joss Whedon realized The Gentlemen on-screen. Whedon, “…wanted guys who would remind people of what they were scared of when they 🐓were children.”
13 ꦑ Grave Concerns
Given that this was a widely viewed television show, it might not have gotten darker than when the tꩲeam decided to create an actual graveyard for the purpose of the series. Season 1’s graveyard was a set, but from season 2 onwards, the team decided to make their own in the warehouse’s parking lot. Carey Meyer, the production designer, had this to s𓄧hare with the BBC: “We poured in kerb, back-filled it with dirt and planted grass and lots of trees...”
The set was designed to help with Hollywood’s green screen magic. They could angle the cameras in such 🧸a way as to make certain graveyard features appear bigger than they really were; trees, headstones, and the like. Joss Whedon did feel that the set-based graveyard had more scope, but none of the ease of acces♛s, especially in regards to shoot-times and production schedules.
12 Buffy, Int☂errupte💛d
Buffy changed networks after season 5, moving from WB to UPN. Probably desiring to make things darker, the new network rendered season 6 quite controversial. The titular heroine, Sarah Michelle Gellar, has gone on record (at an event in Paley Centre; 2008) to share how atrocious the whole experience fe💫lt to her. To be asked to turn her character around left her feeling terrible.
She said the season was a struggle.
The reason why we added this point to our list is to show readers and fans just how deep actors get into their roles and how harshly some changes/alterations to that role can affect them on a deep emotional/psychological level. As you can imagine, chances of her being changed for life is not far-♏fetched; the dangers of performing is very real. We’re just glad they brought back the real Buffy later. Talk about a dark night.
11 𝓡 Study Time
Under the preten🐭tious name "Buffy Studies," several colleges and universities have begun to provide courses on the show. While classical knowledge is indeed a thing, and even philosophy has a respectable place in the academic ranks, we can’t help but shudder at the prospect of a show being discussed academically. This is something that fans do anyway via theories and arguments, debates, and controversies.
It’s a dark day indeed when academia takes such things to an unwanted level, reports of which you’ll find covered in the Los Angeles Times. With paper topics ranging as widely as "postmodern reflections on the culture of consumption" and "slayer slang," we’re looking at a ridiculously irrelevant branch of study that’s not r🎀ooted in th📖e real world at all. This just feels disrespectful of the process of academia and all those striving to learn something more useful for their futures.