Horror and Humour Gone Wrong: Buffy Season 6

As Carrol mentions in ‘Horror and Humor”, Buffy the Vampire Slayer is one show that frequently danced between genres, with fantasy, action, romance and of course, horror and comedy at the forefront. Because of this hazy line between genres, it can be difficult to know what to expect; it mashes up, evades, and scrambles conventions to an unpredictable effect. In the obvious sense we see this in character deaths; there are many instances in the show of main characters dying, Miss Calendar, Kendra, Tara, Spike, and on several instances Buffy herself. Joss Whedon has said himself that he did this to keep the audience on their toes and tell them that this was not going to be like other shows. However, we also see this unpredictability in the playing between genre conventions as Crane discusses in ‘It was a dark and stormy night…’. One key idea that he raises is that when two genres like horror and comedy collide, there is no clear path for the narrative, no established code that the show would follow. The audience had no idea whether the villain of a piece would pose a real danger or if their efforts would all come tumbling down for the sake of a gag; trust is withheld entirely.

One instance where this lack of trust is utilised is the big bad of season six. Comprised of three of Sunnydale’s biggest geeks, a band of self-proclaimed supervillains attempt to scare and kill Buffy, always via some form of goofy gadget or ploy. Buffy looks down at them and laughs, and the audience is supposed to laugh along with her. That is until they start to pose a real threat. We are lurched out of the comfort of comedy when the leader of the trio, Warren, resorts to a simple gun as his weapon of choice to kill Buffy. While he only manages to wound her, one bullet manages to kill Tara. To give the audience whiplash one last time, this causes the emergence of Dark Willow, a much graver threat but one that disappears after three episodes. Allegorically speaking this was done to represent real life dangers such as addiction and gun violence, in contrast to other seasons’ more fantastical motivations. By season six, the characters had matured significantly since their days in high school, leading to more daunting issues and an increased need for comic relief.

It is possible for many to find humour in the low-quality special effects and at times corny dialogue. We frequently see Buffy deliver a Carry Bradshaw-esque one-liner after brutally killing a world threatening demon, and it can be difficult to know whether to laugh out of relief that the threat is gone, at the one-liner or the shocking CGI.

The band of geeks were unmistakably intended as comic relief, but the effects of using the same characters as both the monsters (as Carroll references) and the point of comedy, fell flat for many viewers. The audience’s reaction to these villains was not good, generally agreeing that they were unthreatening, stupid and downright annoying. Caroll says that both feelings of fear and amusement “can be provoked by what to all intents and purposes appear to be the same stimuli”, and we can see that clearly being attempted here. So why does it fall flat? It seems that this is because the comic and horrific aspects of these characters do in fact contradict each other in the most literal sense. They are too goofy to be scary and too cruel to be funny.

Contrastingly, most other seasons execute the balance well, the character Spike posed a real threat to Buffy and became a source of fear for both the characters and audience, and when he lost his ability to harm anyone, his character become amusing. These aspects of his character got switched out and so could not be contradictory in the same way as the geeks, making him a much more successful execution of horror comedy.