Rock-horror: how Buffy the Vampire Slayer's music continues to draw blood

Almost 20 years on from its debut, Joss Whedon’s TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer continues to exert its influence. Just ask the Potentials, a Buffy-inspired UK pop-punk band readying the release of their smart, scuzzy EP, We Are the Potentials. “It is about being a ‘potential’ slayer: a superhero with no superpowers but making it up and giving it a go anyway,” says guitarist/vocalist Holly Casio. “We sing about witches, misandrist vengeance demons, demons on the internet – aka men –and the revenge of invisible girls.” A previous EP, Who’s Playing at the Bronze Tonight?, was more explicitly Buffy-themed, its name referencing the club that featured in the series and featuring tracks such as Quitting the Watchers’ Council.

The commercialisation of the riot grrl movement was in full effect by the time Buffy began airing in 1997. Teen feminism had become hyper-visible but defanged, reduced to unit-shifting buzzwords and women-in-rock pieces. As the US academic Amanda Howell has pointed out, Buffy spoke to this flux because it was a series with an “almost obsessional reflexivity” towards gender roles in rock and pop culture, celebrating and critiquing teen rock tropes with a stake-sharp combination of horror, humour, action, romance and irony.

Sarah Michelle Gellar’s wisecracking, demon-dispatching lead – written by Whedon as a corrective to decades of blonde “bubbleheaded” horror victims – was, wrote Rachel Fudge, “Sassy [magazine] incarnate”: a blonde cheerleader-turned-warrior battling diabolical foes and teen angst in Sunnydale-on-Hellmouth. “Is Buffy really an exhilarating post-third wave heroine, or is she merely a caricature of 90s pseudo-girl power?” asked Fudge.

It’s a question Buffyphiles are still enthusiastically debating, more than a decade after the show’s demise – online, in scholarly journals, and in person, at conventions, conferences and gatherings.

For fans of the knotty intersection between feminism, pop culture and rock, Buffy offers a rich study. A pop sphere where young women found – and struggled with – their agency and power, it was also a space where decades of cliched rock machismo were mercilessly yet affectionately deconstructed

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At the Bronze, Sunnydale’s seedy rock venue, female artists were a regular presence. Real bands who made cameos there included the Breeders (who included the Buffy theme song in their sets during their 2002 UK tour), Cibo Matto, Bif Naked, Michelle Branch and Aimee Mann.

“Mann is the only musician to play the Bronze who gets a line of dialogue, the classic ‘I hate playing vampire towns’, in season six,” says arts critic Sophie Mayers. “Buffy feels so redolent of the mid 90s and nostalgic for it. I definitely thought about Buffy and its music when Mann appeared on Portlandia as a symptom of ‘the dream of the 90s’.”

Despite its celebration of female indie artists, Patricia Pender, author of I’m Buffy and You’re History, says one of the show’s most enduring legacies is the famous musical episode, Once More with Feeling: “It was a soundtrack that people ripped and listened to over and over again; that people congregated in cinemas to sing together en masse; that my friends still play today in the car to their kids. Whedon and co knew what they were doing when they wrote a score that felt ‘classic’ after only listening to it once.” As Mayer points out, “all cool shows now have musical episodes, and with Matilda, Fun Home and Hamilton, self-aware musicals are cool again.” Once More with Feeling helped set the trend, and made such an impact that it gets recreated on stage by students, like a conventional musical.

Buffy wasn’t perfect: it was overwhelmingly white, for one thing. But while other paranormal franchises with Strong Female Leads have followed – such as True Blood and the Twilight Saga – none have managed the extended afterlife Buffy enjoys. The Potentials’ Holly Casio and pals are testament to that longevity. “We organise Slayerfest, a Buffy-themed party, every Halloween. Last year we made a replica Class Protector award to give out to the winner of the best Buffy costume, and Seleena from [Clueless-themed pop-punk band] the Whatevers performed a tap dance to the Buffy theme tune.”

Once more with feeling, indeed.