Buffy the Vampire Slayer has its roots in horror, but horror has its roots in fairy tales – witches, (were)wolves and skin-changers all prowl the French and German folk tales collected by the Brothers Grimm. It’s not surprising, then, that Buffy occasionally drew on fairy tales in creating its monsters and its spells.

There’s a big difference between horror and fairy tales, though. While both have a tendency to favour virginal young women in lead roles, they have very different parts to play in the story. In fairy tales, the beautiful young woman is frequently a damsel in distress, requiring rescue by a handsome prince. In some cases the young woman will have performed some act of kindness that works out well for her, but for the most part Grimms’ heroines sit around in rooms full of straw, up towers, in glass coffins, in castles where they chat every day to the decapitated head of their talking horse,* and so on, waiting for a prince to notice that they’re really a princess, or a helpful messenger to bring them the imp’s true name, or someone to jolt the coffin so they wake up (true love is sometimes involved, but true love’s kiss is Disney’s obsession).

Thanks to popular slasher movies, the virginal heroine’s role in horror is rather different. Horror heroines are much more likely to be the Final Girl, the sole survivor of some kind of massacre that kills off the rest of the cast one by one. By definition, the Final Girl cannot wait around for a prince to rescue her; with everyone else dead, she has to rescue herself (though there are variations, in which the cavalry arrives just in time to save her). Buffy the Vampire Slayer takes this increasing female empowerment one step further by endowing the blonde girl who usually gets killed early on in the horror movie with superpowers and allowing her to fight back, keeping many more of the cast alive.

All this female empowerment doesn’t always sit too well with stories of helpless princesses. Some early episodes like The Witch and Teacher’s Pet have a fairy tale vibe, but Halloween undercuts the idea of the princess by demonstrating how useless the pink-swathed elegant young lady Buffy turns into is in a crisis, and as the show progresses, Willow (who would surely have been the Final Girl in a more conventional horror) becomes a powerful witch, and one usually (with one notable exception) on the side of our heroes, not trying to cook and eat them.