Abstract

Since the appearance of the 1992 film Buffy, The Vampire Slayer (hereafter BtVS) and the popular 1997-2003 TV series based on it, Buffy has become a cult figure of global media culture with a panorama of websites, copious media and scholarly dissection, academic conferences, and a fandom that continues to devour reruns and DVDs of the 144 episodes. The series caught its moment and its audience, popularizing Buffyspeak, the Buffyverse (the textual universe of the show), and Buffypeople, who dedicated themselves to promoting and explicating the phenomenon and exemplified the British cultural studies ideal of the active audience, able to both quote and interpret, while citing episode and season. A global popular, by the time the series reached its apocalyptic conclusion in summer 2003, it was widely recognized as one of the most striking cult TV shows of the epoch.