The Buffyverse and Beyond

Dove Cameron (Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.)has released a video for her new Single, ‘Boyfriend’, which explores her queer identity which she made public last year. The…

This month Buffy the Vampire Slayer celebrates its 25th anniversary. Throughout its run from 1997 to 2003, the series saw incredible critical acclaim, with multiple accolades. Sarah Michelle Gellar, who plays vampire slayer Buffy Summers, is credited with changing the way female protagonists were viewed on television and was nominated for a Golden Globe for her work on the show.

The show’s case and crew constantly broke barriers in an otherwise formulaic space. Body swaps, musicals, and an episode solely revolving around the shock and grief experienced the day someone dies: no background music, no sharp one-liners, and no monsters. And it worked.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The 25th Anniversary #1 is an anthology one-shot published by BOOM! Studios. True to its name, the anthology contains a number of stories centred on the titular Slayer and her friends, with a number of creators delivering the same mix of humor and horror which made the television series a staple of pop culture. It also teases a number of future series, which contains BOOM!’s expansion of the Buffy franchise following series like Buffy: the Last Vampire Slayer.

There are a lot of memorable parts of the Season 3 finale of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “Graduation Day, Part 2”. From beginning to end, the episode represents some of the show’s best writing and character development. But Buffy’s graduation scene, featuring the climactic battle between the Scoobys and the Mayor and his minions as they try to prevent his ascension is one of the most iconic of the whole series.

As Buffy the Vampire Slayer celebrates its 25th Anniversary, US cable company Fuse TV have obtained a licensing deal with Disney Media to air all…

Over the course of seven seasons, Buff The Vampire Slayer tackles grief, sexuality queer relationships and heartbreak more effectively than any teen drama before it.

Subsequently, its legacy lives on with young adults still discovering the oracle that is Buffy Summers every day.

Metro.co.uk spoke to women who still feel the impact of Buffy in 2022

As a teen, I binge-watched Buffy on VHS sets resplendent with gothic fonts and smouldering cast portraits. Sarah Michelle Gellar as Buffy, clutched a stake that coordinated perfectly with her honeyed highlights. David Boreanaz’s Angel – a vampire with soul and perfect cheekbones – gazed lustfully out from the margins, alongside Buffy’s geekier friends Willow (Alyson Hannigan) and Xander (Nicholas Brendon), and father figure Giles (Anthony Stewart Head). Weekends would be swallowed whole by new Buffy boxsets; I’d be sitting in the dark probing over every quip, kill, and monstrous metaphor for young womanhood. As a chubby Black adolescent, I found that representation that outwardly reflected my lived experience was thin on the ground. But somehow Buffy, a Californian blonde and designated saviour of mankind, moved through the world with familiar alienation.

Today, Buffy the Vampire Slayer turns 25. This means two things. One, I am officially old, and two, this is a ripe time to look back at the legacy of this cult show. Twenty-five years on, Buffy is much more than disgraced show-runners (more on which later) or even the resurgence of its distinctive nineties fashion. This is a show which utterly redefined the way we view female-led drama and foregrounded a feminism which was remarkably nuanced and subtly game-changing.

When “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” premiered in the spring of 1997 as a midseason replacement on a fledgling network with a talking frog as its mascot, few predicted it would make it to a season two, let alone seven seasons and 144 episodes. Certainly even fewer predicted that it would become the cultural phenomenon that it is today, with a still-beating heart 25 years later. And yet!

If you’ve never watched the entire masterful series of Buff the Vampire Slayer, which turns 25 today, you’re seriously missing out. Not only do we have Buffy Summers (Sarah Michelle Gellar) kicking some serious vampire butt, but the high school teenager – who’s mysteriously gifted with superhuman strength to fight the undead – does so in style. She’ll drive stakes through the hearts of her fanged enemies while wearing badass leather pants, sleek camis, and butt-kicking angle boots. As each of the seven seasons progress, Buffy’s heroic fashion only gets better, thanks t costume designer Cynthia Bergstrom. More than two decades later, we still see outfits that feel totally Buffy, both on the runaways and street style stars.