The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 43

The Guardian Friday January 15 1999 and pitched a young crowd of semi-knowns (Neve Campbell, Rose McGowan, Skeet Ulrich) to huge effect. A flood of Williamson teen projects followed. Another of his scripts, I Know What You Did Last Summer, was a massive hit, followed by I Still Know What You Did Last Summer soon to receive the homage of an Airplane-style parody called Scream If You Know What I Did Last Halloween. The latest knock-on from the Williamson Effect is TV horror-comic Buffy the Vampire Slayer, lately arrived on BBC2. Based on a 1992 movie that was a little too early for its time, it stars Sarah Michelle Gellar from I Know What You Did it's a very incestuous genre as a bushy-tailed Californian ingenue who is also the world's go-go once more, and "youthquake" has become a Hollywood buzz word, describing the highly marketable new wave of movies aimed at the more callow end of the MTV audience.

The man to blame is Kevin Williamson, writer of Wes Craven's Scream films, which put slasher-pic conventions through the mincer of precocious cine-literacy, and restaged them in a creepy but wholesome slumber-party atmosphere. In the Scream films, an impressionable but savvy high-school audience could watch impressionable but savvy high-school kids getting carved to death, or, more fun still, debating the movie conventions governing the carving. Scream bucked the box-office trend of banking on big names, in i Tn i rn i ii i-r T-riYi i i i ivr tit in i rvirn r'70U can't imagine a 1 quainter, more old-fash-j ioned word than fc'i which evokes a sunny, spot-free world of Frankie Avalon beach movies and Z-grade chillers like I Was A Teenage Werewolf. But teenage werewolves are a- r- rr r. Ti" 1 rri tr-- ri "irr chosen Slayer of the Undead.

Having burned down her last sell 1 1 Butty moves to Sunnydale, which nately to be a of mystical convergence and therefore a "cornucopia of fiends, devils and Tutored by the school's tweedy ex-Oxford librarian, and aided by two nerdy friends, Buffy nonchalantly disposes of vampires, witches and, in this week's episode, a giant female praying mantis, who happens to be the new science teacher. Being hip to matters earthly as well as infernal, Buffy can identify Satan's spawn by their bad fashion sense and immediately twigs to the stick-insect femme fatale: "Her fashion sense screams 'predator'!" The show is a hellish convergence indeed one part Clueless (except that Buffy instructs her acolytes in staking rather than dating), one part the best-selling Goose-bumps kid-horror books, with a dash of urban myth for good measure. I'm not sure Buffy is what you'd call rich in subtext, but in its flip, know-it-all way and few young stars are quite as know-it-all than Gellar it's a textbook example of horror as a device for exorcising adolescent anxieties. For a start, it reassures early teens that they're hip and knowing about a genre that in theory they're not supposed to know too much about, and it makes them feel as if they were actually old enough to stay out late at a Marilyn Manson concert. It also addresses some of the real horrors of school, like bullying and snobbery, embodied in awful WASP princess Cordelia.

It's also anti-elitist Buffy may be a little golden goddess but she's also an outsider, projecting herself as self-consciously dorky and choosing to hang out with nerds Willow and Xander. Of course, this being American TV, the nerds look like eugenic gold-card holders, but still Above all this, there's the horror of sexuality. Buffy is the Chosen One, which must surely entail virginity; the only boy she fancies is clearly some sort of celestial emissary. It was revealed this week that even Sunnydale's cocksure football star is a virgin. In this way, the Is show is true to the tenets of the seventies slasher cycle, in which a tumble in the hay invariably meant a knife in the back.

The adults, conversely, are old and yeucch have even produced offspring. Teenage witch Emily has been forced to swap bodies with her evil Mom, who wants to relive her glory days as a cheerleader. This week, sultry science teacher Natalie French (very evil, very European) was unmasked as a She-Mantis, out to devour Sunnydale's hunky, spunky virgin boys, once they've double yeucch fertilised her eggs. I may once have been a political agenda 1 to this demonisation of 3 adults, aligned with the rise of the counter-culture the howling of teen werewolves at the end of the Fifties surely portends that of Steppenwolf on the Easy Rider soundtrack a decade later. We'll have to see what Williamson makes of the same premise in his new fdm The Faculty, directed by Robert Rodriguez, in which the teachers (you know, really old people like Salma Hayek) are alien body snatchers.

But in Buffy, the theme seems to be in the service of Moral Majority conservatism. Buffy also articulates a classic anxiety about adolescence itself. Its fiends have scaly skin, bad breath, scowl a lot and sleep all day and these are the adults? It seems, rather, as if Sunnydale's youth are displacing their own horrific pubescent metamorphoses onto the adults around them. As yet another teacher winds up headless or crumbles to dust, the teenagers live forever, golden, glowing, bright-eyed and immaculate in every possible way. Pardon me, but who's really the Undead around here? Buffy The Vampire Slayer is on BBC2 at 6.45pm on Wednesday.

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