While vampire lore has permeated many aspects of pop culture through film and television, Buffy the Vampire Slayer presented the creature in two different ways: facial transformation and turning to dust upon death for specific reasons.

Joss Whedon's popular TV series branched off from the 1992 movie of the same name and aired in 1997, running for seven seasons until its series finale in 2003. The show starred Sarah Michelle Gellar in the titular role, and co-starred David Boreanaz, Alyson Hannigan, Nicholas Brendon, Anthony Stewart Head, and others. Joss Whedon has gone on to be associated with several other shows, including FireflyDollhouse, and movies like The Cabin in the Woods and even lent his talents to the MCU with The Avengers. As a showrunner and writer, Whedon made some specific decisions regarding his take on vampires, which remained the central monster of his series, despite Buffy contending with numerous other types of evil as she battled the forces of darkness on Sunnydale, California's Hellmouth.

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Though care was taken to keep some existing facets of vampire lore for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Whedon and his colleagues made a few changes to the classic monsters that edged them away from Dracula (even though he made an appearance in season 5) and other more stagnant tropes. In horror, the vampire is one of the most mutable and ever-changing, and has run the gamut between incredibly vicious and terrifying to played for laughs in movies and television like What We Do In The Shadows. Despite being off the air for almost twenty years, Buffy has endured as a prevalent feature in pop culture, and Whedon's changes to vampires have since become iconic, though he changed them up for surprisingly practical reasons.

Why Buffy's Vampires Transform & Turn To Dust

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Vampire Turning to Dust

Although a tedious process to secure the prosthetics that actors had to wear in order to shift into 'vamp-face', Whedon had his reasons for wanting vampires that looked like monsters instead of normal people. Other shows, such as True Blood, have done very little to differentiate between vampires and regular people; in True Blood, for example, the only real difference was the extending of fangs from normal to clicking down into sharpened versions of very human-looking canines. In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a vampire's whole face changed from their natural state to a more monstrous one, with a bumpy forehead, different colored eyes, and a mouth full of sharp teeth.

Whedon chose to lean on this transformation to show a difference between a normal-looking person and a threat, and has commented that he felt a show that required the level of human on vampire violence as Buffy did would be a bit more palatable to audiences if they looked like monsters instead of regular people. If they looked normal, and there was little to no distinction, the idea of a high school girl killing them by stabbing them in the heart could be a little darker than he intended.

When Buffy stakes a vampire on the show, they turn to dust. This, along with their unique facial structure, has also become iconic, but it was for a very practical reason. Whedon has stated that he didn't want to explain all the random bodies that Buffy would leave lying around Sunnydale in the show's plot, and also it would take away from the budget to spend the crew's time cleaning up after every episode. The animations were refined over the course of Buffy the Vampire Slayer's seven seasons, and even lent to some additional creativity as to how Buffy and the Scooby Gang actually dispatched their undead foes.

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