Tuesday 23 November 2010
A new Buffy the Vampire Slayer film is to be made – without Joss Whedon. Can worshippers bear to watch?
Sarah Michelle Gellar, in a scene from the cult American TV show Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Photograph: PA
Oh, this is terrible. I feel like Buffy at the end of season two, with Angel poised on her swordtip and torn between her loyalty to the man(-type thing) she loves and her duty to a higher calling. What do we do? Where do we turn?
Such is the dilemma posed by the news that a new Buffy movie is to be made – without Joss Whedon. The creator of the Slayer, first incarnated in the 1992 film starring Kristy Swanson and then reborn as the protagonist of the world's best ever television series, does not own the film rights. Those who do – Kaz Kuzui, executive producer on the series, and his wife Fran Rubel – have decided to reboot the franchise without him.
Spike himself would surely blanch – were he not already bloodless – at the heartlessness, the brutality of such an undertaking. To remake Buffy without the man whose controlling intelligence and vision informed it more thoroughly than was the case with any other series in TV history (at least until David Simon's The Wire and Matthew Weiner's Mad Men) seems, at first glance, like a very special form of idiocy.
And yet. And yet. Once the first shock has worn off, what – if we don the Willow Rosenberg mantle of indefatigable optimism – are we left with? The chance of more Buffy. The remoter chance – the vagaries of film-making being what they are – of more good Buffy. Not the same Buffy, not Whedon's Buffy, but perhaps something true enough to the original not to induce screaming agony in those of us who worship at the Joss-SMG altar. Or, if it's bad, the knowledge that it can safely be dismissed. Without the Whedon imprimatur, it is non-canonical. It cannot taint him or all that we already know and love. As Raymond Chandler once comforted himself and his fans after a number of his books were unsatisfactorily filmed – "Look, there [the books] all are. They're fine. They're not ruined. They're still there."
So, sprinkle your box set with holy water and start channelling the white magicks towards a happy outcome, but don't forget to cover your bases with a phone call or two to the Master and Drusilla. Because if Buffy becomes a Hilary Duff vehicle or the means of an attempted Lohan comeback, I promise you this: Sunnydale's gonna burn.
Guardian
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