Joss Whedon Had Two Rules For Making The Vampires In Buffy
The show may have been called "Buffy The Vampire Slayer," but the chosen one (Sarah Michelle Gellar) fought all different types of monsters, not just the fangy, blood-sucky kind. For series creator Joss Whedon, this was to ensure his premise had enough to sustain itself in the transition from a movie to an ongoing TV series:
"Though ['Buffy'] had been a fun idea for a movie, I wasn't really sure if there was a whole series there, just about this girl going and killing vampires. So, I started to think about it and I came up with the notion of playing all sorts of horror movies in high school and making them really metaphors for how frightening and horrible high school is."
Whedon said as much in a 1998 interview (when "Buffy" had started its third season). In bringing these vampires to life onscreen, Whedon said there were two, contradictory rules: they had to look both demonic, so the audience would understand they were monsters and take Buffy's side when she slayed them, and normal, so scenes could have tension about whether or not a character was a vampire. The solution required a bit of make-up.
Two-faced challenges
Whedon and the "Buffy" team chose to give their vampires two faces, a human one and a demonic one (with fangs and snake eyes). "When they feed or when they get very emotional, their demon faces sort of come out," Whedon explained. "I wanted them to look monstrous so that when Buffy killed them we didn't feel this was a girl just killing people." In their transformed state, the "Buffy" vampires looked like ravenous bat demons, and when they died, their bodies crumbled into dust — no one would confuse a vampire slayer for a serial killer under those conditions.
As for misdirecting the audience, Whedon noted the show was able to pull off the twist of Angel (David Boreanaz) being a vampire because of the face-shifting. The "Buffy" pilot also opens with the vampire Darla (Julie Benz), playing the part of a Catholic schoolgirl, luring a boy to his death by promising a makeout session and then going into vamp mode. This scene is a riff on the elevator pitch for "Buffy" — a blonde girl gets cornered in a dark alley and kicks the monster's ass. This time, the blonde is the monster. This scene wouldn't have been possible if vampires always looked scary.
Whedon's comments about ensuring the audience didn't like the vampires tracks with comments made by James Marsters, who played fan-favorite bad boy vampire Spike. According to Marsters, it took Whedon a long time to accept Spike's popularity with the audience, because vampires like Spike were meant to be problems for heroes to overcome as a metaphor for them growing up. Characters being seduced by the challenges of adolescence was not the story that Whedon wanted to tell.
To make the vampires extra creepy, "Buffy" added an interesting wrinkle to how humans are transformed into vampires, or "sired."
Truly inhuman vampires
The mechanics of vampire transformation are the same as Bram Stoker's; the vampire bites the victim and then feeds the drained human their own blood to complete the siring. However, in "Buffy," the human dies ... and then doesn't come back.
Instead, a demon grows inside and possesses their corpse while inheriting their memories and personality. In the first season's second episode, "The Harvest," Xander's (Nicholas Brendon) best friend Jesse (Eric Balfour) is turned into a vampire. Giles (Anthony Head) explains to Xander: "Listen to me, Jesse is dead. You have to remember that when you see him, you're not looking at your friend. You're looking at the thing that killed him."
This is why vampires have no mortal souls — whichever one previously existed in their meat puppet went onto the afterlife before they moved in. It also fits with vampires not aging; a corpse is frozen in time and presumably prevented from decaying by the demon's presence. Finally, their "vamp face" — that's the demon inside showing its true visage. Season 1 big bad The Master (Mark Metcalf) always looks like Nosferatu because he's outgrown "the curse of human features."
"Buffy" ultimately couldn't resist humanizing a few of its vampire characters: Angel got a whole spin-off about his quest for redemption, while Spike went from "the villain, [to] the wacky neighbor, [to] the wrong boyfriend, [to] fallen man trying to redeem himself [to] a kind of guinea pig hero by the end." Darla got an arc of redemption all her own on "Angel," while former mean girl Harmony (Mercedes McNab) stayed around as comic relief after she got sired.
However, such vampires were always the exception, not the rule. Learning that seemingly innocent people can be monsters underneath is one of adolescence's most valuable lessons, after all.