If a spooky film during the Halloween season it must be, then I will take a film like Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992).  It is not perfect, at least not in a Catholic sense.  In the climactic moment when the title character, Buffy Summers (Kristy Swanson), faces her archnemesis, the vampire Lothos (Rutger Hauer), she produces a Crucifix to repel him.  It is a classic trope in these tales, but it is meant to symbolize ultimate good triumphing over the ultimate evil.  However, when she brandishes it, he grabs it and sets it on fire.  That is not ideal, but maybe it did not work because she had Jesus facing her instead of him?  Still, though a silly, horror-comedy, it is at least uncomplicated in its stance on who is on what side of that proverbial moral line.

Before she is Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the only line Buffy is on is the one with her fellow cheerleaders.  She is there to support the Hemery High School varsity basketball team.  As is the Hollywood stereotype, her status on the squad makes her popular.  When she is not pepping up crowds, she is shopping with her friends and planning intimate nights with her boyfriend, Jeffrey Kramer (Randall Batinkoff).  While she might seem like your typical high school senior, there is something different about her.  A private trait of hers to which we are treated are her strange dreams in which she is living out past lives fighting monsters she does not understand.  Another is the fact that she is being observed by Merrick Jamison-Smythe (Donald Sutherland).  Upon their first meeting in the mall, Buffy takes him to be some creepy old man, and he is dismissed just as quickly.  Besides, she has more important things to think about, like disapproving of Oliver “Pike” Pike (Luke Perry) and Benny Jacks (David Arquette), two “loser” friends who disrupt her clique while watching a movie.  There is also cheer practice and planning for the next school dance.  She is also too busy to notice that a few of her classmates begin to go missing, like Jeffrey’s teammate Grueller (Sasha Jenson).  It is while Buffy is trying to get on with her life that she is approached once more by Merrick.  His story is unbelievable to the teenager.  He is a person who has died and been reincarnated several times over the centuries in order to train the chosen one, the person to carry on a millennia old battle against the forces of darkness in the form of vampires.  In real life, this is what we have God for, and I wish this had been a bigger part of the story, but I digress.  Naturally, she thinks he is crazy, but it is not until he begins listing details about her that nobody else could know that she begins to take him seriously.  The eeriest insight are the dreams, which is what convinces her to follow him to the cemetery.  There they witness the birth of a pair of vampires, and she instinctually knows what to do in order to kill them.  Thus, she accepts that she is a slayer, but the question becomes: now what?  For her, it is about training.  As she hones her skills, more people go missing, like Benny.  A few days later, Benny turns up at Pike’s apartment hovering in midair and asking to be let inside.  Pike can tell something is off, so he does not break one of those other cardinal vampire rules by inviting Benny inside.  Another of Buffy’s classmates is abducted, and she is brought into the presence of Lothos, which is the first time we meet him properly.  With everything going on, Pike decides that he is going to try to get out of town, but his rickety van breaks down before he can get far and he is attacked by Lothos’ chief lieutenant, Amilyn (Paul Reubens), and a couple other blood suckers.  Pike is saved by Buffy, and she invites him back to her house to stay for the night.  It is the beginning of a bond between them and a sign that she is growing distant from her usual clique.  The bond is going to come in handy when she goes after Grueller, who tries to play basketball but is noticed by Buffy for the fiend he now is.  There is a brief chase that is observed by Pike, who follows them to a parade float parking lot where he helps defeat a few more creatures of the night.  It is also at this point that Lothos confronts Buffy, and she is powerless under his gaze.  However, she is kept from any harm by Merrick’s intervention, who dies in the process.  His last words to Buffy are to wait for the music to stop.  She does not understand the meaning of the phrase, and is ready to give up on vampire slaying.  What she wants is to be a normal high schooler, but her compatriots have also turned their backs on her.  For example, when she goes to the dance, she finds Jeffrey with one of her friends.  Buffy is about to have bigger problems.  Because Benny had overheard Buffy and Pike arguing about her mission, Benny knows her true identity.  Thus, Benny tells Lothos where she will be and when, sending all his minions to attack the school dance.  The situation is complicated when Kimberly Hannah (Hilary Swank), Buffy’s former friend, inadvertently invites the fanged ones into the gymnasium.  Nonetheless, Lothos is Buffy’s priority.  After fighting her way through a number of the other devils, she once more comes face-to-face with her enemy.  His spell over her is broken when the music from the dance stops, and their fight spills back onto the gym floor.  She defeats him in front of everyone.  As the students are being cleared out, her and Pike have one last spin on the floor and the film ends.

School dances, shopping, fawning over boys, is there anything about Buffy the Vampire Slayer that is not a stereotypical high school film.  Of course, that is the point.  It is intended as a comedy, and it is supposed to be amusing to have a cheerleader who thinks El Salvador is in Spain to be the chosen one to combat evil.  A Catholic might have a different perspective.  God chooses some unexpected instruments to carry out His will.  In a general sense, it is using the meek to humble the mighty.  You can find references to this in the Bible, such as in 1 Corinthians 1:27, “. . . God chose the weak of the world to shame the strong.”  Still, Buffy is not weak.  In order to prove her skills to her, Merrick throws a knife at her and she instinctively catches it.  Instead, she is not what people expect, including herself.  Jesus Himself would be one example of God’s atypical tools.  Scripture discusses in several places how the people of His day did not think the Messiah would come from such an origin as His.  They also wanted Him to be an Earthly King, one more literally in the mold of David as in sitting on an actual throne in their lifetime.  In the same way, the last place one might look for a vampire slayer is amongst the cheerleaders, even though they are gifted athletes.  Catholic history is full of other instances.  One that comes to mind is St. Teresa of Calcutta, better known as Mother Teresa.  Her mission was to ease the sufferings of those burdened by the evils of poverty.  She was also quite diminutive in stature.  Whether talking to world leaders or crowds of people, her message was always the same: remember the poor.  She was their defender, and, in a sense, we could say the same about Buffy protecting others from the forces of darkness.

Yes, it is kind of silly to compare Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Mother Teresa, but so is the film.  It is just silly enough for me to wonder why it gets a PG-13 rating.  Maybe it is because there is a little blood in it?  Otherwise, it is fairly harmful, and a better choice than the vast majority of horror films.