Can you tell I enjoy discussing genre archetypes? I always seem to come back to them – and why not? As I mentioned in my original post on teen movie archetypes, these genre conventions are what define the genre itself. When it comes to “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” (primarily in the television series, but also in the original movie), however, we find that many of these teen movie archetypes have been turned on their ear. But first, a little background on Buffy.
“Buffy the Vampire Slayer” is a Joss Whedon character first portrayed by Kristy Swanson in the 1992 film of the same name, then by Sarah Michelle Gellar in the television series that started in 1997 and continued until 2003. Buffy Summers is, in a nutshell, a high school cheerleader who finds out that she is “The Slayer”: a person born into every generation who is fated to fight vampires and other supernatural nasties. Cue opening credits with music by Nerfherder.
Joss Whedon has been quoted as saying that “the idea for Buffy came from all the horror movies he had seen featuring a helpless young blonde who would almost always be the first to die. He felt she needed a better image.” (source: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118276/trivia), so right away we know that this subverting of the archetypal blonde cheerleader is completely intentional. In addition to subverting the character archetype of the cheerleader, Whedon also delivers his own twist on the archetypical high school clique. Take a look.

The Scooby Gang
They could be right out of “The Breakfast Club” or “The Faculty”, right? From left to right we have the nerd, the social misfit, the cheerleader, the teacher (or in this case, the librarian), and the popular girl. But consider that, in “Buffy”, these characters associate with eachother more out of choice than out of circumstance. At the beginning of the series, the characters are thrown together because of the supernatural events that are going on, but as the series progresses, genuine friendships and relationships form. It’s almost as though Joss Whedon wanted to show what happens with the archetypical “Breakfast Club” characters after they are forced to hang out for the first time and start becoming friends. The teacher character being a part of the clique is also unusual, as the teacher character is almost always seperated from the group of friends, even when the teacher is a mentor figure as in films like “Dead Poet’s Society”. The character of Rupert Giles (Anthony Stewart Head) fulfils a similar role to John Keating (Robin Williams) as the group’s wise and experienced mentor, but as Buffy’s Watcher (her assigned guardian), he also takes on a fatherly role, replacing Buffy’s ever-absent biological dad.
I feel a bit like I’m babbling here, and I apologize. There’s a lot of ground to cover with Buffy.
One of the most important characters of the series (not pictured above) is the character of Angel: the mysterious rebel, ever the man of Buffy’s heart, and also…a vampire. Oh, the drama!

Angel: dark, mysterious, and prone to hemoglobin consumption
The troubled, on-again-off-again relationship between Buffy and Angel is a constant throughout the first three seasons of the series, and incorporates many themes and motifs from teen films and television shows, such as star-crossed romance, issues associated with a younger girl dating an older guy, and, not least of all, the loss of virginity. One of the two episodes that we watched on Tuesday night was the episode “Innocence” from second season, wherein Buffy loses her virginity to Angel and, as a result of the curse placed on him, he loses his soul, becoming an evil vampire just like any other.
This episode is all about a fear common to high school teens (girls in particular) that losing their virginity will change them drastically, and that, immediately following the loss of their virginity, their significant other will change as well – into someone who is the total opposite of who they thought he/she was. The loss of one’s virginity is also a sort of high school rite of passage, considered the defining moment of someone becoming an adult. This idea is echoed in the final moments of the episode: as Buffy and her mother celebrate Buffy’s birthday, Buffy’s mother comments that Buffy doesn’t look any different than usual, while Buffy admits that she feels as though her whole life has changed.
All this is only the tip of the iceberg. I could write an entire blog on how “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” relates to the teen movie genre in general (and the teen horror and romance genres in particular), but there is simply not enough space here to encompass it all. Suffice to say, the episodic structure of the television series, coupled with the fact that, unlike many television series, the characters on “Buffy” actually grow, graduate high school, and become adults, allows for thorough explorations of a variety of teenage and young adult issues in a way that movies simply cannot.