The result was an unfussy pre–Spice Girls girl-power fantasy for a 12-year-old kid. When a slayer trainer named Merrick (played by a laughably staid Donald Sutherland) informs her of her vampire-slaying birthright, she misses nary a beat as she sports neon spandex to learn to fight, trading in her jock boyfriend for a biker ( Beverly Hills, 90210’s Luke Perry) and her miniskirts and heels for plaid and boots. This was a pre- Clueless, Skittles-tinted ode to California ditz as the screenwriter Joss Whedon wrote of his heroine, played by Kristy Swanson, “She is blonde (in nature as in name).” But she wouldn’t hesitate to slash your hot dog in two if you crossed her. It had gloss and edge-but more gloss than edge.

But something about this particular movie was bewitching to a tweeny bopper with an alternative undertow. Of monsters.īuffy arrived right before it became cool for teenagers to brood about real things like depression and the cost of Doc Martens. The line captured the glib effervescence of a bubblegum B-movie in which a cheerleader discovers her destiny as an assassin. That’s why it stood out to me as a prepubescent girl-before I got my period, before I got existential, before I stopped caring about vampires (if I ever did). “A ll I want to do is graduate from high school, go to Europe, marry Christian Slater, and die.” That line, from the 1992 movie Buffy the Vampire Slayer, may have been spoken by a teenager, but they were the words of a child.

The killing room movie poster