Kirsten Stevens Meet the Cullens: Family, Romance and Female Agency in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Twilight [1] In terms of their literary and even filmic origins, tales of the vampire emerged to be consumed first and foremost by adult readers and viewers. Certainly the exploits of Count Dracula, whether revealed by Bram Stoker (1897) or Tod Browning (1931), [1] were intended primarily to frighten and caution the ‘grown-ups’ of late nineteenth and early twentieth century society. As Jörg Waltje reveals, it was not until the emergence of horror comics in the 1940s that the vampire was presented intentionally to a younger, adolescent audience, and even here the move was met with resistance (Waltje 2005, 87). Concerns about adult themes of sex and violence implicit and explicit in the figure of the vampire were seen as potentially harmful to the juvenile audience. The resulting controversy saw the figure of the vampire once again barred from juvenile literature, not to re-emerge for the youth audience for close to two decades (Waltje 2005, 87). [2] In light of this early reluctance to introduce the vampire to youth markets, it is then interesting to note that in the last dozen years, two of the most successful vampire franchises have been unashamedly located within the ‘teen genre’. The two ‘franchises’ of which I speak, and which will provide the key area of focus and comparison for this paper, are the long running WB television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003) and Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight saga. [3] Both Buffy and Twilight join a growing trend towards the location of the vampire within the teen and juvenile sphere. While certainly in the context of film this trend seems an inevitable result of what Thomas Doherty describes as the ‘juvenilisation’ of the American Hollywood cinema (Doherty 2002, 2), this trend also reflects the ability of the vampire to articulate many of the issues faced in adolescence and the fears implicit in growing up and entering the adult world (Wilcox 2005, 21). Buffy and Twilight then join the likes of Joel Schumacher’s The Lost Boys (1987) and Tom Holland’s Fright Night (1985) in offering teenaged vampires to teenaged audiences, and perhaps more importantly, offering these vampires as the teenagers themselves. [4] While undeniably teenaged, the worlds of Buffy and Twilight present distinctly different views. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, conceived by creator/writer/ director Joss Whedon, takes up the story of Buffy, a blonde sixteen year old Californian teenager, whose sacred duty it is to fight and slay the vampires and all things which go bump in the night. The story is taken up in season one as Buffy arrives at Sunnydale High, having recently been expelled from her L.A. high school for burning down a gymnasium full of vampires—I mean asbestos (‘Welcome to the Hellmouth’, 1001). She soon falls out of the popular crowd at her new school and into the socially marginalised friendship group which provides the enduring characters and friendships for the show’s seven seasons. This group, known as the Scooby Gang, consists primarily of the Slayer, Buffy Summers, her friends Xander Harris and Willow Rosenberg, and her Watcher Rupert Slayage 8.1 (29): Stevens http://slayageonline.com/essays/slayage29/Stevens.htm 1 of 25 4/29/10 7:24 AM