Buffy  Vs. Dracula: Episode 5.1

While watching Buffy Vs Dracula, I was easily able to compare this video to the novel our class read. Buffy became Mina, Xander became Renfield, Giles became Van Helsing, Riley as Johnathan, etc. While reading the novel, it was hard for me to understand why Dracula came off “so appealing to Mina (Buffy), but watching a video to follow up the information in the text, it is clear how Dracula’s seduction is able to hypnotize Buffy in this episode. Dracula and Buffy’s first encounter is in the middle of the night in the middle of a gloomy cemetery. She attacks him without much conversation beforehand, then strangely enough, returns to her bed and falls back asleep. Meeting him for the second time, she then finds out that he has been “searching the world for her”. Similar to the novel, Dracula in “fog form” enters her room through her window and suddenly appears. Without much hesitation, Buffy moves her hair from her neck and slowly but surely, allows him to penetrate her neck with his teeth. Her reaction to this bite reminded me much of a women in an orgasmic state. She went completely numb as he took full control over her.

 

Xander, who plays “Renfield”, is walking home alone and comes face to face with the Count. At first he is frightened to be alone with Dracula, but after being hypnotized, he starts referring to him as “Master” and "The Dark Knight", agreeing to whatever Dracula asks of him. In return for this favor, Dracula tells Xander he will forever be immortal. I realized that Xander took on the role of Renfield when he grabbed a spider off the leaves of a bush and quickly ate it while no one was looking. 

 

Gender roles were obviously shown throughout this film. When the group wouldn't allow Buffy to do anything on her own because she was too weak to handle Dracula, it proved how much more valued men were because they were "stronger". In Buffy Vs Dracula, I think Buffy was given more credit for slaying Dracula compared to the credit Mina got in the novel. Buffy ends as the hero of the group, while Mina was just one of the few who ended as a hero in the novel. Mina and Buffy should be the heroes at the end because they were victims of Dracula, and still managed to take him down once and for all. In the Buffy Vs Dracula episode, it was a more modernized version of Stoker's novel Dracula, so it helped me to understand the important parts of this story line more clearly because I was seeing these events visually instead of reading a text.