Into Every Generation a Slayer Is Born: How Buffy Staked Our Hearts

Explore the history and cultural impact of a groundbreaking television show adored by old and new fans alike: Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Over the course of its seven-year run, Buffy the Vampire Slayer cultivated a loyal fandom and featured a strong, complex female lead, at a time when such a character was a rarity. Evan Ross Katz explores the show’s cultural relevance through a book that is part oral history, part celebration, and part memoir of a personal fandom that has universal resonance still, decades later.

Katz--with the help of the show’s cast, creators, and crew--reveals that although Buffy contributed to important conversations about gender, sexuality, and feminism, it was not free of internal strife, controversy, and shortcomings. Men--both on screen and off--would taint the show’s reputation as a feminist masterpiece, and changing networks, amongst other factors, would drastically alter the show’s tone.

Katz addresses these issues and more, including interviews with stars Sarah Michelle Gellar, Charisma Carpenter, Emma Caulfield, Amber Benson, James Marsters, Anthony Stewart Head, Seth Green, Marc Blucas, Nicholas Brendon, Danny Strong, Tom Lenk, Bianca Lawson, Julie Benz, Clare Kramer, K. Todd Freeman, Sharon Ferguson; and writers Douglas Petrie, Jane Espenson, and Drew Z. Greenberg; as well as conversations with Buffy fanatics and friends of the cast including Stacey Abrams, Cynthia Erivo, Lee Pace, Claire Saffitz, Tavi Gevinson, and Selma Blair.

Into Every Generation a Slayer Is Born engages with the very notion of fandom, and the ways a show like Buffy can influence not only how we see the world but how we exist within it.

Evan Ross Katz is a writer, podcast host, and high-pitched loudmouth whose work has appeared in the pages of GQ, Harper’s Bazaar, Interview Magazine, Rolling Stone, Oprah Magazine, Teen Vogue, Town & Country and more. He is a fashion columnist at Paper Magazine, a contributor at The Cut, and host of the podcasts Shut Up Evan and Drop Your Buffs. He is best known as the world’s preeminent Sarah Michelle Gellar historian and a ＂die-hard Buffy aficionado,＂ according to Vogue, and for being blocked on Twitter by Kim Cattrall in 2017 (she has since unblocked). He was selected as one of Fast Company’s Most Creative People in Business 2021.