"Nightmares" and "Living Conditions": My First Buffy Experience

I have to begin my first blog post with a confession: I have a somewhat limited experience with the gothic. I’ve read Frankenstein, seen a handful of “scary” movies, and since my high school years were mostly spent going to local all-ages shows, I have also paid $10 to see suburban teenage boys do their best Marilyn Manson impressions more times than I care to admit.
Despite these brushes with the “dark”, I have never identified myself as a lover of the gothic. I never had any inclination to watch Buffy or read Dracula. It’s not like I’m the president of the One Tree Hill fan club either; I have a mildly unhealthy obsession with crime dramas, which can certainly be dark in their own way. It’s just that I’ve always had more interest in material that dealt with interpersonal relationships and the “real-life” monsters that populate shows like Law and Order.
However, my newfound exposure to Buffy has opened my eyes to what I have been missing by largely shunning the gothic tradition it represents. Much of the literature I am typically drawn to derives its conflict from its characters’ decisions to suppress certain aspects of themselves. Whether it is Elizabeth and Darcy hiding their true feelings from each other and themselves in Pride and Prejudice or Gatsby reinventing himself in order to be “worthy” of Daisy in The Great Gatsby, I am always intrigued by the characters tendency to shy away from what scares them, as it mirrors the very real pressure to deny one’s own “demons”, however minor, even when doing so has negative consequences. While gothic literature has no lack of secrets lurking in the rafters of its ancient castles, I have noticed that its characters do not shy away from what frightens them. As much as I was frustrated with Laura for not getting as far away from Carmilla in LeFanu’s story, I must admit that there is something refreshing and almost cathartic about watching a character travel towards the “dark” instead of away from it. This is the appeal of the gothic for me; it lies outside of our social structure which teaches us to repress our own “darkness” and keep that of others at arm’s length. Buffy, from what I've seen in "Nightmares" and "Living Conditions" takes this anti-social aspect of the gothic and injects it into what are perhaps the most hyper-social times of our lives: high school and college. Buffy easily overtakes her demon roommate by sending her back to the dimension she came from, but she is left to deal with the potentially more difficult problem of how to live with a best friend without destroying said friendship. The show combines all the social commentary that I love about Jane Austen novels with all the danger of a story like Carmilla. The juxtaposition of the control required by society and the recklessness found in the gothic has the somewhat unexpected consequence proving that the scariest things aren’t necessarily vampires, but ourselves.