It’s 1997. You turn on The WB network—probably after watching Dawson’s Creek—and a new show is premiering. Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The title alone sounds cheesy, maybe campy.
The pilot opens with a familiar scene: A teenage couple breaks into Sunnydale High at night. The girl is blonde, petite, wearing a short skirt. She’s nervous. “Are you sure this is a good idea?” she asks. The boy is confident, cocky. He reassures her. They’re alone in the dark school.
If you’ve seen any horror movie from the 80s or 90s, you know exactly what’s about to happen. The blonde girl is going to die. Probably horribly. She’s the sacrificial victim that establishes the threat. She exists to be scared, to scream, to run in heels and inevitably trip.
Except.
The camera pulls back. The girl’s nervous expression shifts. She asks, “Are you sure we’re alone?” And when the boy confirms they are, she smiles, fangs out.
And attacks him.
The blonde girl isn’t the victim. She’s the monster.
And in 90 seconds, Buffy the Vampire Slayer announced exactly what kind of show it was going to be.
The “Helpless Blonde” Trope Buffy Was Designed to Destroy
The “blonde victim” in horror wasn’t just a trope, it was nearly a requirement by the late 90s. From Friday the 13th to Scream (which had come out just a year earlier), horror movies opened with the same setup: young woman, isolated, vulnerable, then dead.
The show was created by Joss Whedon, who went on to direct Marvel films like The Avengers. Whedon has described the show’s premise as taking “the girl who gets killed in the horror movie” and making her the hero.
But that cold open? That’s not even about Buffy yet. It’s about training the audience.
The show is saying: Everything you think you know about how this works? We’re going to flip it.
Why This Scene Is Perfect for Teaching Expectations and Subversion
This 90-second scene teaches something crucial about how stories work and how readers/viewers bring expectations that can be deliberately manipulated.
Scholars have found Buffy “particularly multi-dimensional—trading heavily on allegory, myth, and cultural references.” As Douglas Kellner, a UCLA professor, noted, the show’s fantastical elements provide “access to social problems and issues and hopes and anxieties that are often not articulated in more ‘realist’ cultural forms.” In other words: monsters act as physical stand-ins for societal differences and threats, making complex themes tangible and discussable.
But this cold open does that work in reverse. Before the show even teaches us its allegorical language, it’s teaching us to question our assumptions about who gets to be powerful and who gets to be prey.
For students, this cold open raises questions like:
- How do creators set up expectations?
- What cultural knowledge are we expected to have? (In this case, horror movie conventions)
- How does subverting those expectations change tone?
- Can something be scary AND funny at the same time?
- How do stereotypes function in storytelling—and what happens when you flip them?
This teaches more than media literacy because these are the exact skills students need for reading any text where expectations matter: unreliable narrators, plot twists, satire, dramatic irony.
The Student Activity: Analyzing Expectation and Subversion
I’ve created a student activity (free download below) that walks students through analyzing this cold open:
- Students describe what they see in the setup. What do they expect will happen? Why? What genre conventions are being established?
- What actually happens? How does the show subvert expectations?
- Cultural context – Students learn about the “blonde victim” horror trope and why this moment mattered in 1997. What did Buffy change about how female characters could function in genre TV?
The Bigger Picture: Why the 90s?
This Buffy cold open is part of my larger “90s Context of the Week” series—using cultural moments from the 1990s as strategic teaching bridges.
Why the 90s specifically? Because they occupy a perfect sweet spot: recent enough that footage exists and references are accessible, distant enough that students don’t have political stakes or personal defensiveness, rich enough in shared cultural moments to build deep contextual knowledge, and in our wheelhouse since we lived through it.
Plus, when you focus on one decade for your cultural bridges rather than scattering references across eras, you’re building thick knowledge of the decade.
Want the full framework for this approach? Check out my 5-Day Crash Course: Teaching Literature Through 90s Cultural Bridges. You’ll get reference charts, discussion frameworks, planning templates, and the context you need to use these strategies confidently.
Download the Student Activity
Ready to try this with your students? The activity includes scene analysis, cultural context about the horror trope, and questions about how creators set up and subvert expectations.
Download the “Buffy Cold Open” student activity
“Why 90s Pop Culture Might Be Your Secret Weapon for AI-Resistant Teaching“ – This Buffy activity is one example of the broader strategy explained in this post: using cultural time anchors to create engagement and community that AI can’t replicate.
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