By Chris Snellgrove
While Buffy the Vampire Slayer had a rocky Season 1 because of its low budget, that lack of cash helped to accidentally create the perfect season finale. That episode (“Prophecy Girl”) had plenty of show-stopping moments, including the reveal of a giant demon that lives within the Hellmouth and is always waiting to emerge, hungry and ravenous. Originally, Buffy’s producers wanted to use CGI to create its tentacles, but the low budget forced them to use human actors for each tentacle in a bit of guerilla filmmaking that created (if only by accident) the perfect Season 1 finale.
If you need a recap of “Prophecy Girl,” here goes: our heroes discover a disturbing prophecy that The Master (the show’s first Big Bad) will escape imprisonment the next day and that Buffy will die. The Slayer is traumatized by hearing this prophecy, but she eventually marshals her courage and confronts The Master, who kills her by letting her drown; fortunately, Xander is able to resuscitate her via CPR, and she goes on to defeat her vampiric nemesis and save the day. Meanwhile, Giles, Cordelia, Willow, and Jenny Calendar all fight a three-headed Hellmouth monster whose portrayal looked great, thanks to the use of practical effects.
The Hellmouth demon was a weird tentacle monster, one that we can only assume has been a featured player in some very weird fan fiction. Even in the ‘90s, it was becoming increasingly common to use CGI to bring such ambitious creatures to life, but outside of big-budget shows like Star Trek: The Next Generation, most TV series computer effects from that era have aged very poorly. The Buffy producers wanted to use CGI for this monster’s Season 1 finale appearance, but because they couldn’t afford to, they opted instead to animate each tentacle by putting in an actor who could manipulate these tendrils as needed.
And here’s the thing: relatively speaking, this monster looks great: it’s larger than life and clearly bigger, badder, and hungrier than anything our heroes have ever faced before. It honestly looks like Buffy by way of The Thing, and this Season 1 finale’s use of practical effects is a big part of why the episode has aged so gracefully. Such practical effects are why we still laud John Carpenter’s The Thing as a spooky masterpiece while its 2011 prequel is a CGI-filled monstrosity that looks so bad that not even the presence of the lovely and talented Mary Elizabeth Winstead can get us to rewatch it.
We’re that much more grateful for these practical effects in Buffy’s Season 1 finale because many of the effects of that season look downright bad. The HD conversion of the show effectively made this worse…bad cropping cuts out important visual elements, and added brightness reveals just how bad things like vampire makeup were in the show’s early days. The forced widescreen makes things downright goofy: in “Prophecy Girl,” for example, we can now see The Master when he’s hiding (originally hidden by the 4:3 formatting), and it’s hard not to laugh at Buffy unable to find someone who’s obviously standing right in the middle of the same room.
Had Buffy’s Season 1 finale gone with CGI to bring the Hellmouth monster to life, it’s a safe bet that the low-budget computer effects would have looked terrible, and the later HD remaster would have made it even uglier. Fortunately, human actors and practical effects were used to create one of the show’s most memorably scary monsters, and we’re eternally grateful that one of TV’s best finales wasn’t marred with bad computer effects. These days, awful computer effects in TV and film are absolutely rampant, leaving us with one major question: since the CGI apocalypse is already here, can we still beep Buffy to save the day?
