It’s October, and that can only mean one thing: spooky versions of our favourite TV shows! Starting today and continuing every Friday until the end of the month, we here at Paper Droids will share some of our favourite Halloween episodes with you as our special countdown to Halloween!
We’ll start the creepy festivities off with one of the more popular Halloween episodes to grace our small screens: Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s first Halloween episode, appropriately titled “Halloween”. The gist of this episode is that Ethan Rayne, costume shop owner and chaos worshipper, transforms the residents of Sunnydale into their costumes. Now, Buffy is trapped in the body of a helpless princess, leaving her and her friends vulnerable to Spike and his gang of newly created monsters.
This episode is great for a lot of reasons. Plot-wise, it is the set up for both the relationship between Willow and Oz, gives Xander the military weapons knowledge that will later be needed to defeat The Judge, and the reveal of Giles’ rebellious past. It also expands on some of the problems Buffy, a mortal, faces in her relationship with Angel, a vampire. Buffy originally chooses the girly costume in hopes of replicating the type of girl Angel would have dated when he was mortal, only to find that such changes to her personality are not at all necessary.
It is also a huge character moment for Willow, who spends the start of the episode reconciling her shyness with her desire to stand out on Halloween. As the only one of the original trio with her memory intact, yet stuck as an incorporeal ghost, she finds herself becoming more outgoing in hopes of saving her friends (and Cordelia)… and of course, unintentionally gaining the attention of Oz in the process.
Is it a scary episode? Well, sort of. Willow dying and coming back as a ghost was a bit of a shock, and seeing little kids morph into demons is never fun, but I personally find there was a bit more of a comedic slant. Willow walks through a wall and scares Giles, Buffy is screaming and fainting all the time, Xander is suddenly acting like the man in charge without actually understanding what’s going on around them, and Coredlia… is Cordelia. So if you’re looking for something that will scare you out of your skin this Halloween, maybe skip over this one. If you’re looking for characters out of their element with a few good chuckles along the way, this episode may be the one you are looking for.
