I should apologize. I've been distracted for a while, and one of the things that distracted me was a presentation I had to give. I've given it & it's below for your 'edification & amusement'. There is no bibliography as the presentation is taken from a work in progress (namely, my dissertation), though it does not fully resemble this work - er - in progress.
I am also upset to discover that I cannot copy the footnotes from Word to this entry. There are 'thousands' of them!! From attrbvuting quotes & paraphrasing, including page numbers, to thoughts further delineating comments made in the body of the text. My next entry will be those footnotes as I labouriously copy them.
In the meantime, if there are any questions at all, please feel free.
see ya.
ps: remember, the whole thing was written to be read aloud. And it was. So, if the sentence construction's a bit whimsical, allow for it.
THE USE OF MYTH IN HORROR
1st 3 Seasons of Buffy The Vampire Slayer & short stories of HP Lovecraft.
Let’s start in the dark, when the “knell that summons thee to heaven or hell” begins it all. So much horror starts in the dark, as it should, for the dark realizes the mythic potential in any landscape, be it external or within the hearts & souls of men! In the dark, anything is real: the thing under the bed, the horror in the closet, the noise outside the window, and the myths that bind those terrors into us have the space to play, to replay, endlessly yet without trite repetition. Campbell, in Creative Mythology, says: “I can see no reason why anyone should suppose that in the future the same motifs already heard will not be sounding still – in new relationships indeed, but ever the same motifs,” and that is certainly true of both Buffy & Lovecraft, not to mention much of horror.
“Terror,” writes Stephen King, “often arises from a pervasive sense of disestablishment; that things are in the unmaking.” It’s the other side of ecstasy, the result of the incursion of the Divine into the norm, reminding us there’s more to life than humdrum routine. Anthropologist, Durkheim, described a duality within the universe, the Sacred or Divine - transcendental and idealised, and the Profane or mundane - everything else, the material world. Within this duality horror, fantasy’s darker half, can – and does – occur, for when the Sacred intersects with the Profane, when the Divine erupts into the everyday, then horror generally ensues, ‘cause you can bet that the Divine manifestation will usually be of the less pleasant persuasion.
This is obvious in Lovecraft, his tales drenched in the terror of the imminent appearance of occult beings that hail from out of time, the province of the Divine ; and not only is “Buffy” the ongoing cosmic battle between good and evil, Buffy’s very self is a dynamic example of the collision of sacred with the profane, like her world where the natural order of things is somewhat skewed. Both works refer frequently to ‘the demon dimension’, or in illio tempore – archetypal time, going back beyond the primal to those seething, chaotic aeons before creation from whence come the monsters, the demons, the magic of creation, the miscegenation resulting in the heroes, the last of whom was born two thousand odd years ago. This particular myth remains thematic in Western culture, including popular icons like “Buffy” and the writings of Lovecraft, drawing from: the Sacred - where the myths live.
Myth, like life, seems defiant to definition, but if we take it to mean those stories from ‘the beginning’, when we needed ‘stories’ to contain, to explain existence within the known universe, be it in the mountains or by the sea, then there is one explanation. They explained little, these stories, gave few answers, but provided all important context: rules, rituals to be followed to achieve the desired result in whatever area: moral, spiritual or physical. As such, it’s concerned with first things, both activities & individuals setting patterns and authority or structure. In both Buffy and Lovecraft, characters time & time again face those first things, or individuals who strive to reprise a Sacred beginning into a contemporary focus. Robert Graves says (& I paraphrase), behind every great story, you’ll find a myth (a good example is The Terminator), and myths still underlie the institutions forming the social fabric of this twenty-first century.
With the Earth now surrounded by darkness & vacuum instead of heavens & hells, no longer considered the centre of the universe let alone the solar system, we still remain fascinated by the paradox of myth, horror residing in harmony with the ethereal epiphanies of a multi-faceted Divine. Both “Buffy” and Lovecraft’s stories, appearing at opposite ends of the twentieth century, employing different media, speaking from different ages and to different audiences, portray the chaos and horror implicit and explicit in the collision between the Sacred and the Profane, in that eternal battle between good and evil. They utilize universally mythic themes and reinforce the common property of all ages: death, birth, fear of the unknown, acknowledging the mystery that still fills our neon lit, multi-media enhanced nights and our very private dreams.
“Buffy, The Vampire Slayer” concerns the adventures of a Vampire Slayer named Buffy - absurd name befitting an absurd concept, and to cap it all, Buffy is all her name implies: small, cute and teenaged blonde, wrestling common-place teenaged angst over boys, academic uncertainty and bad hair days, all of which contrasts with her supernatural powers of strength, speed, healing and dexterity. Superficially, “Buffy” is nothing more than it appears: iconoclastic, trivial, entertainment for young adults in the older teenage bracket, complete with the focus on clothes and the dating rituals of American High Schools. But (and there must always be one of those) we’re also confronted by Vampires and all sorts of other terrifying occurrences both supernatural and not particularly thanks to the ominous sounding presence of the Hellmouth. A wonderful plot device that allows for just about anything – mythic even in its name. Each episode presents eschatological as opposed to teenaged angst as the characters face some type of apocalyptic venture or Armageddon-type showdown. Fortunately, Buffy’s the quintessential, very active, if somewhat reluctant hero embodying most of the heroic traits we so admire in Gilgamesh, Hercules, Indiana Jones and Xena. Like all heroes, Buffy’s essentially good with that most necessary streak of stubborn willfulness without which the story just wouldn’t be half as entertaining. She does what every hero does: she saves the world, several times per season.
Lovecraft’s works are an entirely different matter. There is no soft, blue televisual light in the nights of Lovecraft’s dark tales, no whimsical dialogue, no supernaturally endowed hero secure in centuries’ old traditions to save mankind from a folly not entirely of its own devising. Lovecraft’s horrors occur mostly in the eastern states of America where winters are longer, colder, darker than in sunny, quirky, over-the-top California; he wrote in a time when the mountains were still thickly forested, when the land’s non-white history still loomed with an almost prehistoric presence in the wilderness remaining around the growing cities of Boston and New York. While “Buffy” takes the horror in Sunnydale for granted and manages to ‘deal’ – if not in a time honoured, a nonetheless successful and entertaining fashion, in Lovecraft’s tales, humans always pay the grim consequences of running into the sacred zone, the realm of monsters and demons, the unritualized encounters with gods and their minions.
The unremitting awareness of the fragility of humanity in Lovecraft is not merely of that individual lives, but of the entire species, its hopes and achievements rendered insubstantial and unremarkable against the massive chaos of an infinite universe lurking just beyond our perceptions. His focus is introspective, fascinated by our helplessness against the onslaught of, or encounters with the ‘Sacred’. Unlike in Buffy where Giles – the ‘book guy’ – defends our Slayer & the gang from total ignorance, madness is Lovecraft’s reward for the curious, the delvers into lore and tomes of musty, ancient books. Knowledge in his universe becomes a very dangerous thing. The chances of surviving an encounter with something of the ‘Divine’ in Lovecraft’s world is minuscule, even if the ‘Divine’ encountered is not necessarily evil as such, sometimes it’s too different to be comprehended.
Lovecraft’s characters are also enmeshed in that eschatological angst, which when placed alongside the equally eschatological awareness of the early decades of the Twentieth Century, makes a great work table for both wonder and horror. He concentrates on mankind in general (and I use the word advisedly in this context), its place in, not just the planetary, but the cosmic realm, and he finds it wanting. His myths neither comfort, attempt to sustain nor explain, he just has fun illustrating humanity’s inability to deal with things beyond its ken, whether ahead of us in time, or far back in a dreadful, brutal past, playing with a non-linear sense of history in comparison with “Buffy’s” more straightforward use of time. Time past & time future point to one end which is always present, as TS Eliot says. The cosmic scale of Lovecraft’s horror brings the Sacred and the Profane into very sharp focus, equally as sharp as that found in “Buffy” where, on one side of the street, normalcy is all the go, and on the other is that truly terrifying collision between the dual states of reality. And in the middle? There we sit, mouths agape, wondering how humanity got this far at all, especially when considering Lovecraft’s perception of the cosmos, spawning inconceivable beings of overwhelming and incomprehensible proportions.
“Man, apparently, cannot maintain himself in the universe without belief in some arrangement of the general inheritance of myth,” says Campbell, and as the horror genre frequently involves some form of the cosmic conflict between good and evil, it cannot help but have mythic echoes. Characters in ‘horror’ scenarios are generally placed in situations bigger than themselves, facing threats or enemies far outranking the norm, so, inevitably a mythic quality is invoked as the outcome generally speaks to the continued survival and safety of humanity in toto, where the natural order of things needs to be restored, where the wasteland of life needs rejuvenating. The wasteland’s an excellent partner to darkness and is found in many a horror tale. Joseph Campbell describes the ‘wasteland’ as “the land where myth is patterned by authority, not emergent from life . . . where all is set forever and ever . . . where poets languish and priestly spirits thrive, whose task it is only to repeat , enforce and elucidate cliches.” . This is the land of “Whispering Corridors”, Korean Horror film, where conforming and competing becomes an almost inhuman requirement, in “The Matrix” where reality is portrayed as a program fed into the imprisoned humanity lining massive chambers. It’s the land of “The Terminator” where humans are kept to work or are otherwise disposed of in an orderly fashion, and is what human civilization would become if the alien in Alien was successful. It’s also represented in Lovecraft and Buffydom, the latter with Synder’s yearning desire for order, the vampires’ hierarchical societies (with the exception of Spike & Dru,), and – well, vampires are not entirely in the natural run of things. In Lovecraft, the wasteland’s represented by his very use of landscape, his depictions of evil cults, not to mention what would happen if the Old Ones ever returned.
With darkness and the wasteland as its aides, horror is uniquely placed to tap into the universality of myth in a more abrupt fashion than its lighter fantasy siblings. It is the “nearness of ultimate things”, as Peter Straub describes it , and holds within its plots and themes an apocalyptic awareness, the uncovering and covering of the sacred, the mythic, the divine.
Darkness is the beginning of the mythic story, the creation story: “God . . . created heaven and earth . . . and darkness hung over the deep.” Genesis, of both the Torah and the Christian Bible, and in a similar vein occur many other creation myths – light comes over the darkness of chaos, even if not always so peacefully. This first darkness is echoed every night, in the remorseless sight of the sun setting behind a cityscape, red and swollen as it diffuses into the haze of pollution, be it London, New York, or the hills surrounding Sunnydale, California. Wherever this occurs, we are left in darkness, perilously aware of “black zones of shadow close to our own daily paths,” as Lovecraft writes and further observes that “now and then some evil soul breaks a passage through.”
But just as not every horror film or story is completely reliant on darkness, those “black zones of shadow” are even more striking and powerful in the mundane light of normal day. An excellent example is the Korean horror film Whispering Corridors, exceedingly disturbing despite most of it occurring during the day, revealing the social horror of an institution governed by competition & prejudice, with a sprinkling of ancient Korean belief systems that allows space for the supernatural. F Paul Wilson’s novel, The Keep, builds its uneasy atmosphere during daylit hours, though, as it concerns the eternal battle between good and evil in the form of a vampiric being, darkness is a prerequisite; as in many a horror tale, exposition of the real horror takes place in the dark, where nothing can be seen and what is heard – well, you don’t want it to make sense. Ultraviolet, the English vampire series, uses the dark to obvious effect, though, being set in London, bright sunlight’s the exception rather than the rule. Ultraviolet’s awfully British. A quieter, more sober use of vampires than “Buffy” presents, even if it’s not BBC, it should’ve been. It compares the darkness of vampires to the darkness of the human spirit, & there’s no sense of play as in “Buffy”. Cameron’s The Terminator uses darkness to underline the horror of the human condition, much as The Matrix’s use of grey and dark tones indicates the horror of reality in contrast with the virtual world which disguises the bleak utilitarianism of humanity’s true role. And Ridley Scott’s Alien? It’s completely situated in the dark, in outer space, beyond the outer rim of the galaxy. Not a lot of laughs in that film.
Where darkness establishes the mythic potential of a landscape, the landscape will have mythic echoes on its own. Sunnydale’s an excellent example of how the use of myth can be either subtle or right in your face - or in your neck as in the opening scenes of “Buffy”. The series opens at night, in the school and within a couple of minutes, there’s a vampire sinking her teeth into the neck of her companion in the darkened halls of the deserted school. Horror’s excellent for immediately establishing the out of the ordinary, the unnatural disorder of things. While we’re aware the killer is a vampire, that’s not exactly what you except to find in a small town American High School dallying with a student in the halls after dark. But then, this is Sunnydale High.
A fascinating place, Sunnydale. Situated in Southern California, famed for its sunlight as opposed to its shadow, it’s as unlike Lovecraft’s dark, bewintered locales as is possible. There’s nothing degenerate, biologically or sociologically amiss with either the town or the inhabitants of Sunnydale; it’s not disintegrating, doesn’t appear consumed by human corruption or the petty evil you find in Lovecraft’s tales (a trait picked up by Stephen King amongst others), but both “Buffy” with its Sunnydale, and Lovecraft’s various settings illustrate how locale, as well as the dark, can foster King’s “sense of disestablishment’, of something definitely amiss, directing you towards those “black zones of shadow” where, by the pricking of your thumbs, something evil this way comes.
Supposedly a ‘one Starbucks town’ , Sunnydale, California, boasts a major high school, a college, a large hospital, airport, docks where freighters leave at least once a week, bus depot; 43 churches, 13 gothic graveyards - complete with ancient, moldering mausoleums - umpteen miles of sewers and to further complicate things , is built on land crisscrossed with fissures and cave complexes. A most peculiar place, only 100 years old, so quite how we get the gothic graveyards, I’m not sure, but they certainly add style and atmosphere for vampires arising from their graves to terrorize the local populace. There’s even a zoo and a museum. Compared with Lovecraft’s rustic hamlets and villages of quaint and ancient architecture, filled with rotting gambrels and the like, Sunnydale is a self-contained environment with its own apocalyptic making monsters already ensconced. There are deserted mansions which grant wounded vampires grand accommodations, though abandoned factories also provide such housing, along with the crypts which make do as bedsits for your lonely single vampire. There are no closely grown forests, no domed hills crowned with ancient standing pillars and other evocative remains as in Lovecraft’s tales, and in Sunnydale, it generally only gets dark at night – unless the current apocalyptic making monster has ordered up an eclipse. Where Lovecraft uses the natural environment to stimulate the imagination and create an ineffable atmosphere, Sunnydale is an environment according to the requirements of the current episode. Despite the obviously televisual adaptability, there’s no mistaking that Sunnydale, California, fits the description of a ‘sacred’ place to a ‘T’.
The town appears part of the everyday world, complete with cinemas, factories, shops, malls and so on, but its roots are in the Hellmouth, the doorway to the demon dimension, which kinda signifies the realm of the Divine. As Mircea Eliade says in Myth Of The Eternal Return: “because of its situation at the centre of the cosmos, the temple or the sacred city is always the meeting point of the three cosmic regions – heaven, earth and hell ” He gives several examples from Babylon, from Jeruslaem, and the Romans. Romans have the mundus. “When the mundus is open it is as if the gates of the gloomy, infernal gods were open.” The last certainly is a very apt description of the Hellmouth! Sunnydale is the epitome of the sacred city. It has myth built into its very structure, for reasons that become apparent in the third season, when we meet the evil mayor of Sunnydale who had built the town over the Hellmouth precisely for its links to the other realms, & provides excuse for just about every piece of weirdness that occurs throughout the series from the coming apocalypse to robot killers. Handy little device!
Lovecraft’s works have influenced almost a century’s worth of horror, be it written or filmed, and that influence is plain in “Buffy”. Indeed, in the 2nd episode of the series, Giles explains to dumbfounded Willow, Xander & Buffy that “This world’s older than you know. Contrary to popular mythology, this world did not begin as a paradise. For untold aeons, demons walked the earth. They made it their home, their hell. And in time, they lost their purchase on this reality. The way was made for mortal animals, for man. All that remains of the Old Ones are vestiges, certain magics, certain creatures.”
“And vampires?” says Buffy.
Obviously the answer’s yes, but apart that, it all sounds like a quote from Lovecraft! When I thought about of “Buffy” & Lovecraft for me essay, I didn’t know about this particular influence, so am fascinated. The hellbeast released when the Hellmouth is opened is kinda Lovecraftian, with the slime & the tentacles & all. Otherwise it might be a Hydra. However, I digress (which is why I’m taking so long to do the essay!). Another point while I’m talking beasties here is the genesis of the demons on Earth. As Giles explains, “The books tell of the last demon to leave this reality fed off a human, mixed their blood. He was a human form possessed, infected by the demon’s soul. He bit another and another and so they walk the earth, feeding, killing some, mixing their blood with others to make more of their kind, waiting for the animals to die out and the old Ones to return.” While this continues the Lovecraft theme, it does bring something else you’ll find in many myths, though they generally refer to humans: that man himself comes from the diluted or tainted blood of gods, demons or heroes. Reading closely through all the begots in Genesis, you’ll see we’re more or less descended from Cain who, being marked by God for killing his brother, is in the Sacred realm himself. Or we’re all descended from Adam who was made Sacred anwyay. So we are - sacred. This is a point marked by Buffy herself, containing the sacred and the profane within her own person, imbued with superpowers that, alas, don’t help in the dating routine or the care of one’s hair.
This isn’t as evident in Lovecraft’s work, but let’s get back to the original point. Landscape. Lovecraft not only uses the natural aspects of the local environment, he also uses the human effects on that landscape to foster an atmosphere suitable for – er - Divine intervention.
Carfax Priory from “Rats In The Walls” is a good example of this. Built over generations of monuments to something obviously unspeakable – not to mention Welsh – the building remains haunted by something which runs back through the narrator’s lineage down to before recorded time, down through Romans, Saxons, Celts, Druids and beyond, back to those favoured demon dimensions, the seething ages of chaos and primal terrors when Cthulhu and Yog Sothoth walked the earth, when Shub Niggurath, the goat of a thousand young brought devastation and chaos to anything and everything.. And you thought we all came from apes!!! There are hints of the sacred in all Lovecraft’s locales, either because of their geographical locations, or the way humanity is unable to make real definition on the land, both of which invite comparison with the wasteland (an excellent example of this blight is Colour Out Of Space). Carfax Priory is a such a place. Built on sacred ground, the malign influences (especially if they appear in Lovecraft) exert a continuing power undiminished from its very beginnings. The place has a rather mysterious history – more a matter of legend than anything else. The final owner, who narrates the story, right up to its frightful conclusion, is as solitary as any outsider, as Buffy herself, and as Marie Lou von Franz observes “. . . loneliness invites the powers of the Beyond, either evil or good.”
The description of the rural landscape where the town Dunwich, of dubious Dunwich Horror fame, is certainly unnerving. “When a traveller in north central Massachusetts takes the wrong fork at the junction of the Alyesbury Pike…he comes upon a lonely and curious country . . . Afterwards one sometimes learns that one has been through Dunwich.” There is always something subtly wrong with the settings Lovecraft uses, no matter that they are rural, wild, or cities. In Dunwich, the feeling is profound, with a “faint, malign odour” that lingers in the small village of decrepit houses, and human influence has been so unsuccessful in the surrounding countryside the area is made even more sinister. In Shadow over Innsmouth, that faint malign odour becomes an overwhelming stench and the place is – well - not right! The middle of the Pacific, that enormous watery (to us land dwellers) wasteland becomes terrifying when great Cthullu rises from watery R’yleh. Life and death themselves become uncertain in this context: “That is not dead which can eternal lie/ And with strange aeons even death may die”
The threat of the wasteland, the inversion of the natural order – all are implied by these landscapes and what they infer. But there’s more to it than this. The Dunwich Horror, Shadow over Innsmouth, Rats in the Walls – in each and many others, Lovecraft employs a theme common to myth and fairytale alike: the wrong turn. Off the beaten track; somewhere unusual, not of the everyday world, in other words. “Never stray from the path,” warns Grandmother in Angela Carter’s “A Company of Wolves” (the film).” The narrator of “Shadow Over Innsmouth” discovers this for himself, straying off the beaten track; he originally had no plans to visit that “ill-rumoured and evilly-shadowed seaport of death and blasphemous abnormality.” After he’s crossed the marshy wasteland that separates the town from the rest of the world, what he learns damns him to humanity forever. A return to Carfax Priory of “Rats in the Walls” was not in that narrator’s life plans, nor would he have ever ended up there, facing his horrendous lineage, if it weren’t for unhappy accidents of war. An aside concerning these last two stories – unlike most of Lovecraft’s tales, the narrators in these two are also examples, like Buffy, of the Sacred colliding with the Profane in their own persons. Demons? Read the stories. Dunwich is reached only by taking a wrong turn. In other stories, places visited the once are never found again. Most towns in Lovecraft’s world are actively avoided because of either rumour and legend, or simply because the places have an ‘unwholesome’ aspect, so the device of straying, of becoming lost, of changing plans on a whim, is the only way anyone gets to see them.
As myth could be said to be fairy tale globalized, this ‘straying from the path’ is very common in horror. In Bram Stoker’s iconic Dracula, though the naive Jonathan Harker goes to the ‘wilds’ of Transylvannia deliberately, he’s ignorant of what he’s getting into; he learns “that every known superstition in the world is gathered into the horseshoe of the Carpathians, as if it were the centre of some imaginative whirlpool.” which should’ve prepared him, but it didn’t, anymore than Lovecraft’s characters are ever prepared to face the Divine, even if they have studied occult matters all their lives as in the case of Robert Blake, protagonist of ‘Haunter Of The Dark’, who also strayed off the path, both literally & metaphorically.
Lovecraft also uses cities, and their almost organic growth in his tales become filled with as much mythic potential as any landscape. He portrays the isolation of the human soul, in the loneliness that can thrive when surrounded by teeming millions. It creates very disturbing atmosphere, especially as, like “Buffy”, authority figures wielding real power are notably absent, or at most, dreadfully ineffectual. “Haunter of the Dark” uses this mix very well, combing Boston’s history with Blake’s obsessions to create a powerful and uneasy atmosphere. New York is given strange and horrific soul in “The Horror At Red Hook”, as in “The Music of Erich Zhan”, “Pickman’s Model”, and numerous others. Many are set in his home area of Boston, a place more steeped in history than anywhere else in the United States, history several centuries old compared with Sunnydale’s mere century old lifetime.
Sunnydale in “Buffy” becomes the mundus of small town America, Los Angeles the present and future wasteland in ‘The Terminator’, a nameless city is the same in ‘The Matrix’, Regan’s body and mind become the ground for the eternal cosmic battle in The Exorcist, the various locales Lovecraft uses are so imbued with history and past horrors that everything reeks of it, it leaches into the inhabitants as happens with most horror. London is used to great effect in “Ultraviolet”, where anything can be read as the signs of vampiric ‘infection’. The Keep employs the human horror of World War II to set the scene for the supernatural terror going on within it. When the Sacred and the Profane collide, everything within the blast radius is affect in some way, and the darkness that is part of the human spirit is likewise affected and called into play.
“The hero does not choose his path. It is fated.” They’re not usually controlled by a bunch of tea drinking, tweed wearing, wanna-be Oxford dons, as in Buffy’s case, but the Watcher’s Council aside, fate seems to be the case with all heroes, from Gilgamesh onwards. It’s one of the most pervasive of myths, even redefined by television and film, and like all mythical signifiers, is too fluid for hidebound definition, so can be trickster, guide, action man figure – whatever, it is the hero. Of course, it’s going to be a powerful motif in horror. Lovecraft’s tales present a notable exception, he has less female protagonists than he does heroes, which is to say, almost none which makes everything more horrifying, because there’s absolutely no hope. That anything is averted at all in Lovecraft often seems to be more blind stumbling luck and desperation than a cool recognition of the nature of the evil, knowledge of strategy or even how to use a stake. Lovecraft’s characters, even those that do manage to survive their brush with the Sacred, are, at most witnesses to the horror; generally, their central role in the story is as witnessing or being witness to the reason for their grisly end (an exception being The Dunwich Horror).
Yet, for even the fated hero, there are choices. In Lovecraft, the characters become enmeshed in their terrors through lifestyle choices. Buffy’s Angel says it one way: “There’s moments in your life that make you, that set the course of who you’re gonna be. Sometimes, they’re little, subtle moments. Sometimes, they’re not.” Buffy and Angel make a choice halfway through Season 2 and set in motion terrible and painful events which last for the remainder of the 3 seasons, and it’s an excellent example. Their choice was not what you’d call a little, subtle moment.
In the horror tale, choice is a major thing. One need only look at Buffy herself to know that while a heroic stance isn’t always a personal choice, what you do with it is. As the demon Whistler says at the conclusion of the second season: “Bottom line is, even if you see ‘em coming, you’re not ready for the big moments. No-one asks for their life to change. Not really. But it does. So what are we? Helpless? Puppets? No. The big moments are gonna come. You can’t help that. It’s what you do afterwards that counts. That when you find out who you are.” Buffy makes all her choices, though conversely has no choice because she knows. In Prophecy Girl, the final episode of season 1 she makes her choice to face death willingly – but for others, not personal gain. It’s her Garden of Gethsemane, if you like, and as such, is surprisingly powerful and profound, as is the double episode Becoming.
Choice is a major thing in “Buffy”.
To further illustrate this, think about vampires. To become a vampire, you have to choose to do so (nicely explained in Interview With a Vampire – film, I couldn’t read the book). Angel did and so became a demon. He didn’t choose to get cursed by the reintegration of his soul, but then, who does? Choice is one major contrast between the 2 works. While the characters in Lovecraft’s tales may show great courage in actually seeking out and facing their horrors, their heroic natures are never fully engaged. The motivations between the two works differ greatly, basically because while Buffy’s tales are told from her position of being within and part of the Sacred realm, Lovecraft’s stories are mostly told from the profane side of things, as none of his characters have a real right to be where they’ve found themselves, which might explain why everything in Lovecraft is not merely inexplicable, it’s incomprehensible, not to mention unnameable. The one exception might be in The Dunwich Horror, but Haunter of the Dark, Rats in the Walls and Shadow Over Innsmouth express the indescribable problem wonderfully.
While Lovecraft’s characters aren’t even anti-heroes, each of the characters in the stories I’ve mentioned (as well as the ones I don’t) do, to some extent, follow the ‘heroic path’ of separation through to reintegration, though they rarely make it. The exceptions are The Dunwich Horror and, to some extent, Shadow Over Innsmouth, though the reintegration presented in that story is a different thing altogether. Reading Haunter of the Dark in line with Campbell’s The Hero of 1000 Faces is an exercise indeed. Not only do you laugh a lot, but realize the protagonist, Robert Blake, makes every mistake possible. Sure, he achieves separation from society, crosses the threshold and is ready to begin the journey, his beginning through that sense of separation was via dreams and scholarly study, but the obsession with the church steeple wasn’t the right way to go, and from then on, he ignores every signal that he’s taking the path to doom. He certainly gains knowledge and the attention of the – um – gods, but who really wants that type of attention? He’s disintegrated rather than reintegrated, never completes the journey.
This happens with many of Lovecraft’s characters. In true hero fashion, Robert Blake is drawn to the unknown, to occult possibilities in half seen things. But as in some fairy tales, as in Alien and the character Kane, Blake doesn’t have the requisite knowledge or protectors; as a result, must face the consequences of his extreme foolhardiness. All Lovecraft’s characters take steps on the first part of the journey, the separation is complete, it’s just not followed through. Even Wilbur in The Dunwich Horror, of which he was actually a part, doesn’t get to complete his journey. In my readings on the subject of horror, I came across a great book: Maps of Heaven, Maps of Hell, by a Jesuit of all things: Edward J Ingebretsen. He has a fascinating take on The Dunwich Horror: reinterpreting it as the birth of Christ, and not only does it work – it’s very disturbing. Like Christ, Wilbur is the result of miscegenation, of what was quaintly termed commerce between gods and women. So Wilbur and his brother are thwarted and the world saved by a librarian. Sound familiar?
Buffy? She never gets to reintegrate either, ‘cause as far as I’m aware, the series as a whole isn’t over. But then again, her separation was never quite complete, she remains part of society; though an outsider, she manages to be both hero as well as schoolgirl. She even graduates, gets excellent marks and is accepted into numerous colleges. It’s an interesting divergence from the straightforward hero myth. But unlike Lovecraft’s characters and their lifestyle choices, in contrast with the vampires she slays, Buffy had no choice – she is the Chosen One, though, thankfully, has almost nothing in common with The Matrix’s ‘the One’, which, though it has its good points, is mostly a fairly inept use of myth and fairy tale (& I’m being polite).
Buffy as hero is pretty straightforward. Even Mom calls her a ‘superhero’, which she sort of is. During the day, she’s like any other superhero – mild mannered (well, not always), sweet tempered (rarely), concentrating on every day productive things (tell that to her teachers!), but at night, a different Buffy emerges – well, not really. She does succeed in her duty, frequently without breaking a sweat (though does break the occasional fingernail) and usually while preoccupied with boys, dating, schoolwork, where her life’s going, what her mother’s doing to restrict her activities, her friends’ woes – still, she’ll slay the vampire/demon/whatever, sometimes in the middle of a discussion, studying or a kiss. Girls are good at multitasking. She’s a superhero, but very human. Delightfully so, as are most of her companions – the Scoobie Gang, and even here, she fits with the archetypal hero pattern: companions that assist her in accomplishing her tasks, even if it that very basic task of staying alive. Very few examples of that in Lovecraft! But Buffy’s the hero. She’s the one with the special powers, apart from Angel who presents some very interesting problems, and of course, she leads. “Seize the moment,” she tells the nerdy Willow in the very first episode of the series, “’cause tomorrow you might be dead.” So Willow does, and with her first choice, plunges them all into the ongoing adventure that is “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”. Buffy is the ‘every (can’t say man here) person’ that our stories are supposed to be full of, and her stories represent the great ‘coming of age’ tradition as she & the gang face the unavoidable Armageddon, that ‘end of days’: entrance into the adult world. Buffy might be even representative of a massive strata of society: western, and definitely ‘Hollywooded’ society perhaps, but recognizable nonetheless - broken home, money problems, school problems, some delinquency, some loneliness, the outsider - a whole list of problems common to many, but that’s where the similarity ends, ‘cause Buffy’s part of the Divine, the Sacred. Heroes of that stature are completely lacking in Lovecraft.
But let’s not forget the other heroes of Buffy: Angel, all members of the Scoobie Gang, and the occasional disruptive force in the person of Spike. Spike and Angel are a fascinating pair. Angel is both Buffy’s lover and nemesis, solution and problem, a real trickster figure – neither one thing nor not, something you can’t take for granted, ‘cause if you do – well, just remember Giles’ words on the subject: “Last time you became complacent about your presence here, things became very black.” Even his name is confounding - Angel, but he’s a demon, the word from the Greek daemon, meaning ‘Divinity, intermediary between gods & men’, and Divine is something we associate with Angels. Then again, he’s a fallen angel, Lucifer lord of light who’s turned into Satan, a major demon. But Angels’ cursed with a soul which grants him humanity if not breath and heartbeat. There’s a lot in a name sometimes.
Spike? Ah – the archetypal trickster. He creates chaos and leaves, but through his very chaos, solves the problems be it dissing whatever Synder said to Buffy’s mom, or helping to defeat the evil Angel in Becoming. Of course he causes as many problems as he solves, but what’s the point of a trickster if he’s all sweetness and light? Through Loki through to Judas and onto Faith, the trickster, the seemingly dark force for chaos, has its place and nothing really works without it.
The Scoobie gang themselves are within the ‘sacred’ – “Yesterday my world was uh oh – pop quiz. Today it’s ‘reign of toads” says a bewildered Xander. Buffy saved their lives, they owe her their allegiance though Xander’s smitten anyway, so would do anything, even if she makes him feel “inadequate – less than a man” It’s all about friendship – they get pulled in through care and concern for each other., though Xander does qualify it ‘cause the first rescue gets him out of chemistry class. Here we find echoes of not only many fairytales, who have heroes with companions, human and otherwise who help the hero achieve his or her goals, but also one of the major heroic archetypes: Gilgamesh (not to mention Jason & the Argonauts). It’s friendship that propels Gilgamesh on his final journey to find the meaning of life is because of the death of his great friend, Enkidu. Buffy has those traits – her great decisions are for her friends, for them she is willing to sacrifice her life. She is the archetypal hero, complete with Christ-like edges that all the critics of this very popular show seem to bypass or in fact, not see at all, as in Prophecy Girl where she goes through a garden of Gethsemane, dies and is resurrected (OK – revived!), does descend into hell in the 1st episode of the 3rd season, and even says to Angel, ‘drink me’, meaning her blood, in the concluding episode of the 3rd season.
I’m not meaning to be overtly Christian here, but the Judeao-Christian myth is dominant in Western society. Our social structure is built around it and everything in Buffy’s life, in Lovecraft’s tales, is based on the infrastructure of that myth. But while I’ve mentioned Christianity, there is another point I wouldn’t mind making. Think about vampires and Christianity – both talk of blood as life, the source of life eternal. Both offer eternal life only after death. OK – drinking Christ’s blood is metaphorical (‘cept for the transubstantiation thingy) whereas vampires need the actual stuff in all its coppery tasting freshness. To become a vampire, you must drink the blood of a vampire. To become ‘saved’ you must drink of the blood of Christ.
Vampires deny the natural order, reject the fact of death, and feed on life, or life’s blood to survive in this twilit world of “neither death nor deathless.” By drinking Christ’s transformed blood, you also manage, apparently, to cheat death, to attain eternal life. Sure, that you don’t have to feed on the living to attain this goal is a difference, but the similarities remain striking. And is one type of proselytism different to another? The Christian belief system has been promulgated through an equal amount of suffering and bloodletting to any told in vampire legends. It lacks the sensuality, the sometimes blatant sexuality of the vampire’s feeding lust, but more than makes up for it in savagery.
A professor in the US considers “Buffy” to be basically group therapy for teenagers, vampires being metaphors for the outsider, I don’t agree. Maybe that’s what they’ve become (& in the episode “Lie To Me”, this is what’s addressed), but the myth of the vampire has been around a helluva lot longer than “Buffy”, Anne Rice, Hollywood or America itself. Gilgamesh’s father was reputed to be a demon of the vampire kind and we’re talking 3rd millennium BC here. Vampires are found in almost every mythology in one form or another. In Asian mythologies, ghosts have what we in the west would have to call vampiric traits – bloodsucking demons who need the blood to survive. Vampires are more than metaphor for a misguided, misjudged western urban youth, they’re a complex metaphor for the Sacred, for the eruption of the Divine into the mundane world of everyday existence.
There’s one more point I want to make here (actually, there’s millions, but I don’t have time) – evil. Or the nature of the Divine, the Sacred in human activities. Lovecraft, and many horror stories present evil as having either a human genesis or facilitator. When Buffy & the gang come across a murder perpetrated by a human, their horror sense is fully engaged. They are truly appalled. “In the moment when someone commits a murder he is identical with the Godhead and is not human.” “You can’t just give and take lives like that. It’s not your job,” says a furious Buffy, something expounded in fairytale, myth & Lord of the Rings! It proves her growing status as not only hero but moral guardian of the inhabitants of Sunnydale.
As pugilistic as it seems, filled with violence of one sort or another, “Buffy’s” not only socially moralistic (if it’s smoking a cigarette, it’s bound to be bad) but the undertone of the mythic is a different morality; it’s OK to go out and slay anything not human, but when a human slays a human – ew! As Cordelia, Willow and Buffy herself would say. Frequently in Lovecraft, more often in “Buffy”, human horror is the real horror. It’s an actual human attaining supernatural and truly demonic dimensions when the evil mayor of Sunnydale ascends that causes the last great battle of the “Buffy’s” 3rd season. His Ascension is truly terrible, though an odd term for it, as Ascension is what happens to Christ after he rose from the grave, though, unlike the local vampires, Christ didn’t, well, not that any legends mention, go around drinking blood.
As you’ll also find in Lovecraft’s tales, the monsters in Buffy are not merely out of myth and legend, such as vampires and concocted demons, they are also out of minds, like the ‘ugly man’ from Nightmares, the Invisible Girl , or the witch who felt trapped by her own life so overtook her daughter’s . These monsters are difficult to separate out from the heroes, from the landscape. They are both part of the dark and what shows the characters the light, like Faith did for Buffy. Despite the collision of the Sacred & the Profane, with monsters coming from the sacred zone, it’s humans who are sacred in this world. Humans are the be all and end all, human life is sacred, so when Faith, Buffy’s dark slayer sister, kills one, then everything goes to pot, including Faith herself.
In horror, evil is mostly, and starkly defined as the ‘divine’; rarely is good also cast as a ‘divine’ force (an eg is The Keep). Evil generally has the starring role (more than one person has observed that Satan gets all the best lines in Milton ) and it’s the powerless humans left to represent the good, fighting off the vastly superior forces of darkness ranged against them. I’m making a massive generalization, but such battles wouldn’t be half as much fun if both sides were depicted as equally matched as they undoubtedly are. It’s the “divine and cosmic drama” . ‘Cause though humans either cause or facilitate the evil by one method or another, they are also the means of solving it, whether that be as Vampire Slayer or a librarian.
As the Lord of Darkness in Ridley Scott’s “Legend” says at the end of his battle with Jack: “”What is light without dark? … What are you without me? I am part of you all. You can never defeat me. We are brothers eternal.” The duality intrinsic to life, the cosmic battle, the collision between the sacred and the profane, are all a part of the mythic landscape, and so are we. William Blake says it best: Terror, the Human Form Divine.
