Joss Whedon vs. the Horror Tradition

The Production of Genre in Buffy and Beyond

Kristopher Karl Woofter, Lorna Jowett, Kristopher Karl Woofter, Lorna Jowett

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781786725417
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Television History & Criticism

Although ostensibly presented as "light entertainment, " the work of writer-director-producer Joss Whedon takes much dark inspiration from the horror genre to create a unique aesthetic and perform a cultural critique. Featuring monsters, the undead, as well as drawing upon folklore and fairy tales, his many productions both celebrate and masterfully repurpose the traditions of horror for their own means. Woofter and Jowett's collection looks at how Whedon revisits existing feminist tropes in the '70s and '80s "slasher" craze via Buffy the Vampire Slayer to create a feminist saga; the innovative use of silent cinema tropes to produce a new fear-laden, film-television intertext; postmodernist reflexivity in Cabin in the Woods; as well as exploring new concepts on "cosmic dread" and the sublime for a richer understanding of programmes Dollhouse and Firefly. Chapters provide the historical context of horror as well as the particular production backgrounds that by turns support, constrain or transform this mode of filmmaking. Informed by a wide range of theory from within philosophy, film studies, queer studies, psychoanalysis, feminism and other fields, the expert contributions to this volume prove the enduring relevance of Whedon's genre-based universe to the study of film, television, popular culture and beyond.

PART I

(Under)Groundwork: Horror Concepts and
Conventions in the Whedonverse

1

THe Slasher Template: Buffy the Vampire
Slayer vs. John Carpenter’s Halloween

Clayton Dillard

The first season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003) begins with two teens—a boy and a girl—sneaking into their high school late at night. It’s a familiar sort of scene to scholars and fans of horror films, almost comical in its naked appeal to the creaky castles of Gothic horror. Yet, the outcome is unanticipated; rather than either of the teens falling victim to a lurking killer or monster, as would be typical, the young woman, Darla, morphs into a vampire and kills her companion. Is this opening a feminist rebuke to the gender politics of the slasher film? Or, is this brief scene less a radical act of practice-as-scholarship than a realigning of viewer expectations within the narrative template of the slasher sub-genre? This chapter favors the latter option by illustrating how creator Joss Whedon refers to the slasher film within the first season of Buffy to utilize John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) as both a narrative and production model for crafting a playful, low-budget television series capable of privileging and melding elements of horror, comedy, and melodrama.

The most prominent accounts of Whedon’s series, in which a young heroine faces weekly challenges from a legion of vampires and monsters, posit its revision of certain archetypes, ranging from quest narratives to vampirism, as the show’s central attraction. These accounts necessarily focus on Buffy, who is positioned as a heroic figure from the show’s first episode. In a paradigmatic account of the series that focuses on Buffy’s placement “within a narrative of the disorderly rebellious female,” Frances H. Early argues that Whedon offers “a fresh version of the classic quest myth in Western culture.”¹ Such a reading compliments A. Susan Owen’s sense of the series’ depiction of Buffy’s body as “signifying toughness, resilience, strength and confidence,” which derives from Buffy “experiencing intense pleasure in physically challenging encounters with various monsters.”² The tough female character, in these accounts, is both a woman warrior and fully in charge of her body and mind; as Owen concludes: “The series reconfigures some of the relations of power in the body rhetorics of horror and action by relocating narrative agency from masculine to feminine.”³

Part of these accounts stems from Whedon’s statement that his idea for the series was sparked by an image inherent to many slasher films of a young blonde woman being murdered in a dark alley by a killer.⁴ For Whedon, this imagery demonstrates that the slasher film characteristically positions the woman as victim; in Buffy, he wants to turn the female victim on her head, thereby making her into a hero. Those familiar with scholarly writing on the slasher film may automatically notice an issue here, specifically regarding the “Final Girl” as theorized by Carol J. Clover. The Final Girl, according to Clover, is a trope of slasher films that designates one member within a larger group of potential victims as the main character; she is more alert and aware than her peers and, in some cases, either virginal or more removed from sexual activity. She is the one who will face the killer near the film’s conclusion. Therefore, she is not simply a victim, but a “victim-hero,” who gains agency through confrontations with the killer over the film’s duration, so that she may, ultimately, appropriate the killer’s own (usually phallic) weapons and, if not outright kill him, defer his threat until another day (or the next installment).⁵

Clover and Barbara Creed are often cited by film scholars as having written the inaugural monographs on the topic of gender and sexuality in the horror film.⁶ Clover’s Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (1992) and Creed’s The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (1993) each give a respective face to femininity within horror filmmaking—specifically the slasher film of the 1970s and 1980s—through the tripartite construction of the monster, victim, and hero: all subject positions variously occupied by female protagonists.⁷ While each of these studies theorizes femininity within the horror film, the placement and role of the female spectator, either theoretically or practically, receives little to no attention. In Passionate Detachments: An Introduction to Feminist Film Theory, Sue Thornham reaches similar conclusions about each of Clover and Creed’s work, saying that their studies of male fears and desires yield “little consideration of the position of the female spectator—so important in earlier feminist film theory.”⁸ In Thornham’s eyes, these canonical contributions to the contemporary horror and slasher film stop short of engaging women outside the screen.

Whedon’s revisionism in the form of Buffy as a psychologically developed and well-rounded protagonist implicitly appeals to female spectators by acknowledging the lack of such a figure within many horror films from the 1970s and 1980s. Buffy is developed into a Final Girl who is not a victim, nor even a victim-hero, but simply a hero, capable of dispatching the threat posed by a weekly villain because she’s versed in the mythology of vampires and navigates the challenges of adolescence—whether social, physical, or emotional—with a certain amount of consideration. It’s not that she is thinly defined by heroic acts, however; her actions are not determined by a singular mode of thought or behavior. Whedon addresses this in reference to “Innocence” (2.14), an episode he wrote and directed during the second season, which depicts the rocky aftermath of Buffy’s first sexual encounter with Angel. When an interviewer asks Whedon whether or not he intends to tell young people to abstain from sex, Whedon responds, “Absolutely not … it was about what happens when a guy stops calling you. What happens if you give him what he wants and he starts treating you like shit.”⁹ In other words, Whedon wants to convey what he perceives the slasher film to omit through its focus on killers and hero-victims: the logic of character emotions. By giving Buffy and her cronies lives beyond the eyeline of a killer, Whedon imagines how such characters handle themselves—and their emotions—in those moments when the killer is not lurking around the corner. The Final Girl, in particular, ceases to be “abject terror personified,” as Clover says, and more like a personification of growing pains both evil and domestic. As a television series, then, Buffy implements exposition and prolonged character mythology where slasher films might typically have machete stabs and post-coital decapitations.

A narrative question (“what happens if …”) defines Buffy’s blend of episodic and serialized television, where characters return week after week to face new trials and tribulations, and with sporadic reference to the previous episodes’ events. Films, even franchises, on the other hand, must confine their narrative to a strict temporal block, where only one “story” can be told, no matter how many overlapping characters or subplots are present throughout its duration. Films may, of course, have scenes and events that happen over a prolonged period of time and afford characters varying degrees of reflection and contemplation, but they nevertheless constitute a single work. Slasher franchises, in particular, have proven beholden to this model, where it is not typically victims and Final Girls that recur throughout the films, but the killers.¹⁰ For example, in the opening scene of Friday the 13th: Part 2 (Steve Miner, 1981), Alice, the surviving Final Girl of the inaugural film, is killed. The scene has little to do with the subsequent events of the film itself; instead, it literally severs ties with the victims of the first film and allows Jason Voorhees, rather than his victims, to emerge as the emblem for the franchise.

Once the focus shifts from killers to victims/victim-heroes/heroes, as it does in Buffy, the series less resembles the traits of a slasher franchise than, say, a horror-tinged version of Party of Five, the teen television drama that ran on Fox from 1994 to 2000, which follows a family of orphaned teenagers as they grapple with the deaths of their parents. That is, just as Party of Five tracks the emotional and romantic entanglements of their characters through a semi-serialized format that requires viewers to be knowledgeable of the plot details from past episodes, so too does Buffy comingle “saving the world” with the standard-issue conflicts of adolescence. Yet we would be remiss to think of the serialized teenage melodrama as Buffy’s origin point. Its bifurcated interest in the lives of high schoolers and their dealings with actual monsters and killers that hope to cause them harm bears a sharper resemblance to Halloween, which has been cited alongside Black Christmas (Bob Clark, 1974) as the first film in the inaugural teen slasher cycle.¹¹

Rather than arguing for Whedon as a commercial artist who is doubling as a feminist film and television theorist, a more productive line of inquiry looks to Whedon’s engagement with the slasher template as a simultaneously commercial and artistic venture that could appeal to female spectators. In doing so, Whedon consulted existing templates for such dual success; the slasher genre, with its typically low-budget production model and intersection with the lives of teenage characters, provides a narrative space to create psychologically defined characters and entice viewers to revel in the confrontations between those heroic teenagers and the evil monsters that crop up in each new episode.

Buffy’s prototypical first season is not a direct remake of or homage to Halloween: the narratives of Halloween and Buffy are only nominally similar. However, each features ideas about horror’s function that revolve around the same set of issues, where the prospect of facing evil is mirrored by the equally daunting challenge of conquering the social and sexual demands of high school, and, in later seasons, college and adult life. In Halloween, we might be tempted to read the deteriorating American suburbs—places that house teenage sex, are prone to home invasions, and conceal the presence of shadowy stalkers—in the wake of a preceding decade that put a damper on nationalist notions of U.S. supremacy. Although David A. Cook doesn’t explicitly make such an argument for Halloween in his monograph Lost Illusions: American Cinema in the Shadow of Watergate and Vietnam, 1970–1979, he says we should read Carpenter’s film as a continuation of Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left (1971) and The Hills Have Eyes (1977), in which “a reflexive indictment of America’s high tolerance for violence” is carried out by “compulsive” villains who “set the standard for the slasher films that followed.”¹² On the other hand, Buffy uses vampires as a framework for its central characters’ uncertainties about their own bodies and desires within the constraints of a hip television series; as such, vulnerable characters are routinely lured into treacherous places in pursuit of either sexual attention or curiosity, though violent death or graphic sexual assault is necessarily excluded. The pilot “Welcome to the Hellmouth” (1.01), written by Whedon, in which Willow follows an unknown teenage boy-cum-vampire into a darkened graveyard, epitomizes this tendency. In Halloween, Laurie is shy and reticent; her angst initially derives not from Michael Myers, the lurking killer, but an upcoming dance in which she might finally admit her crush on a male classmate. While Whedon’s writing dispenses with Carpenter’s minimalist suspense in favor of comedic overtones, the metaphoric potential to understand teenage years spent in suburbia as a living hell—one that resonates with comparably adolescent, middle-class spectators—resounds through each’s work.¹³

Rather than merely pursue the narrative similarities between Halloween and Buffy, I assert that Whedon, having endured a series of compromized projects while writing screenplays for Hollywood, looked to models of indepe...