In Every Generation: Night of the Comet (Thom Eberhardt, 1984)

Hi there! I'm about to blow your mind with moderately obscure Buffy the Vampire Slayer facts, but first, the book announcements:

Be Not Afraid, my new horror comic series with the astonishing Lisandro Estherren is coming out in June. Please pre-order it at your comic shop.

My non-fiction book DILF: Did I Leave Feminism is due out in October. You can pre-order that everywhere, but the way to support your local bookshop is Bookshop.org.

On the off chance you're not sick of me yet, I also wrote a story about an extremely online trans supervillain for DC Pride.

If you are a nerd of a certain age, you will remember hearing Joss Whedon describe his inspiration for Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It came unto him as in a dream, Joss Whedon said, in interview after interview after interview, in one perfect image that sparked a revolution: A teenage girl, blonde and pretty and the kind of girl who dies in every other horror movie, walks down a dark alley, and a monster attacks her. The monster does not win. 

“I loved the idea of a girl going into a dark alley, and a monster comes, and then she just aces him. It’s like, you want to see the tiny person suddenly take control,” Joss Whedon said, in one of the many many versions of this story that come up when you Google Joss Whedon girl alley. “God, my whole career is basically about that!”

You know this. But now you know the rest: This image is not a random vision gifted to Joss Whedon by the gods of network television. It’s a scene from the 1984 movie Night of the Comet, and you can watch it, right now.

To his credit, Whedon has said that he’s a fan of Night of the Comet, and that it “inspired” him. To watch this scene, though, is to see something more than “inspiration.” The silly growly-face makeup and color contacts on the monster; the ambiguous and somewhat unconvincing martial-arts moves (not one punch ever exactly seems to connect); the Valley Girl “likes” and cute-but-corny one-liners coming from our heroine. It’s like learning that your childhood home was the site of a famous murder, or that your mom used to moonlight for the CIA. Here it is, this thing that you’ve loved for most of your life – this thing you felt certain that you knew, as well as any one person could know anything – and it was actually something else, the entire time. 

I’m not slamming Buffy. Nor am I even, exactly, slamming Joss Whedon – not for this, at least. This is just how influence works: Everyone starts out imitating their heroes, and by failing, they become themselves. What I am saying is that, if you loved Buffy, you owe it to yourself to watch Night of the Comet, because it’s where your love started, and (not coincidentally) it’s pretty rad.