The ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ Boogeyman Who Still Haunts Me [I Saw the TV Show]

This Pride Month, Dread Central is releasing the three-part video series I Saw the TV Show, inspired by Jane Shoenbrun’s queer horror fantasia, I Saw the TV Glow, from studio A24.

Over three weeks, Dread Central’s queer staff are teaming up to discuss our own versions of “The Pink Opaque,” the life-altering teen genre TV shows that we were obsessed with as young queer kids in the 90s/2000s, a time when otherness was all the more isolating and dangerous. We’ll share our personal relationship with a horror TV series that changed our young lives and unpack how escapism, monstrous allegories, and social isolation shaped us creatively.

Today’s second episode of I Saw the TV Show is courtesy of yours truly. I’m the managing editor here at Dread Central where I also host the Development Hell podcast. Check out my episode, The Blue Opaque: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, right here, and then check out my accompanying essay below.

I Saw the TV Show: Part II – Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Dread Central Presents
I SAW THE TV SHOW Part II
The Blue Opaque: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
by Josh Korngut

March 7th, 1998.

I’m eight and spending the weekend with my Dad. I get to do this every other week, and I’m usually counting the days for it in bright anticipation. By definition, my father was a true Weekend Dad in just about every sense of the term. My parents were divorced, and weekends at his apartment were a whole different world. There were no rules and no responsibilities. My childhood imprisonment schedule was lifted, if only for four days a month. We both enjoyed this time together immensely. He was, and still is, a true child at heart. And that’s a beautiful thing in some circumstances.

On one of these weekends, I was up alone, far past my usual Mom-set bedtime. My Dad had passed out hours earlier, and I was on the second-hand sofa in front of a large, glowing box television in the living room. It was a bachelor apartment, so I could hear my Dad faintly snoring in the bedroom nook behind me.

I don’t know how cable works, but in those days, some channels would loop their daily programming again at night. This is how I could watch my beloved Sailor Moon again, and I would strategize ways to ensure I’d be awake dangerously close to the devil’s hour. But alternative programming was ready for me on this fateful night in 1998.

I was conscious of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It was a series I was already fascinated by and watched practically every Tuesday with my Mom. But, as the late season two episode “Killed By Death” played on, it was new to me. In the years since experiencing this seminal chapter, Buffy has become my ultimate nostalgia TV favorite, a series that I’ve turned to countless times to help cope with, or even escape from, reality. And the terror I was about to experience would be the catalyst for my lifelong relationship with the YA horror series.

“Killed By Death” is an episode that mostly shrugs the dramatic throughline of the brilliant second season of Buffy, instead retreating to its first season procedural formatting. The story concerns Buffy coming down with a dreadful flu strong enough to put the all-powerful slayer into intensive care. This plot device was already a subversive setup for my young mind, accustomed to my hero being challenged by monsters and bad guys but never the naturalism of sickness. A thing I experienced a lot as a child.

As Buffy recovers in the hospital, she awakens around 3 AM, a bit drowsy but feeling better. She looks over the open doorway of her hospital room to see a dark figure stroll by, wearing a bowler hat and a long black suit. While his face was smiling, I found it immediately and profoundly frightening. Something of Freddy Krueger knock-off, this Freak of the Week had a disfigured place face, white-blank eyes, and wide maw for a mouth complete with protruding jaws held upwards into a permanent evil grin. He tips his hat politely to Buffy and walks deeper into the hospital.

The episode would go on to disclose that this boogeyman-esque monster (Der Kinderstod – German for “Child Death”) was stalking the hospital for kids, which he would sit on top of and proceed to suck the lives out of them with grotesque tentacles that emerged from his eye sockets. Not exactly the type of thing I was prepared for. The idea that children my age were susceptible to being murdered by monsters disrupted my young worldview in that warm glow of my Dad’s bulky television set back on that fateful night in 1998.

Don’t get me wrong, nothing shared here is a complaint. While “Killed By Death” likely traumatized me, it also ushered me into the exclusive club of fear. It sparked my obsession with horror and infused my lifelong passion for making friends with the dark, leading to my current career path. But, as a young queer child in the 90s, the series was not yet the comfort food that it is to me today. It was dangerous. And in the case of “Killed By Death,” opened my little mind to a horrifying new world. I wish I could experience it all over again.

My final thought on this particular late-90s television monster concerns his distinct archetype—a humanoid creature cloaked in the appearance of an anachronistic, well-dressed doctor. The Boogeyman is usually a gripping antagonist style, with standout examples being Freddy Krueger, The Babadook, and Michael Myers, among countless others.

But what still haunts me about Der Kinderstod is how closely he resembles The Man in the Hat, the shadowy vision shared by many individuals affected by sleep paralysis. Could I have instinctively recognized something that so many other people do while they panic alone in the darkness of their bedrooms, unable to move, scream, or even close their eyes? What about this formally dressed Boogeyman that has us in a chokehold?

Could it really be what Death looks like?

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