On the subject of vampires again, you can easily freight them with any sort of baggage you want. You can play up their blood-drinking, infection by bites and sensual nature, and you can make them avatars of diseases transmitted by bodily fluids. You can accentuate the fact they they are dead, cold, unmoving and still chasing you [as in the genius movie Nosferatu], and you can then make them symbols of inevitable mortality. You can view them as person-like entities that used to be people and do many things like people [eat, sleep, make more of their kind] while yet remaining apart from people, and this view entails a characterization of them as a shunned subculture, an oppressed minority group. On a slightly different tack, you can view their nocturnalism, blood-drinking and dislike of religious relics as just facts of life, limitations that they happen to have, and your vampires can be metaphors for disabled people. Polymorphous metaphors aren’t limited to vampires. Think of any other supernatural creature — zombies, ghosts, werewolves, even all the way to mythical creatures such as unicorns and mermaids — and you can pile on the meanings any which way you want.

…Which gets me to the subject of BTVS [Buffy the Vampire Slayer] and Supernatural. Both of them have the same premises, in which vigilant, unnaturally empowered humans eliminate supernatural menaces. However, both shows have different metaphorical perspectives on the monsters that each main character confronts. In Buffy’s case, the monsters are metaphors for the trials of adolescence. Those involved with the show have said as much, and people who analyze BTVS have hammered this point home ad nauseam.

BTVS’ conception of monsters as the challenges of modern bourgeois adolescence appears most clearly and humorously in an episode like Doublemeat Palace, in which Buffy is forced to take a low-status, low-paying day job at a fast-food place to support herself and Dawn. This being Sunnydale, a demon haunts the place, killing employees. It’s not much of a stretch to see how dead Doublemeat employees make concrete the fear of Buffy [and many modern bourgeois teens] that your horrible first job will crush your soul and make your life meaningless.

Even such a plot arc as Angel’s re-demonization after he and Buffy have sex — even this development can be interpreted as a universal teen turning point. While Angel’s loss of a soul after sex with Buffy is clearly the manifestation of a personal demon, an anxiety that Buffy has by her own self, it’s also a more universal panic among modern middle-class girls. Angel’s unensoulment realizes the feminine panic that one’s boyfriend may turn nasty, avoiding calls, harming friends and generally behaving like a dickhead, after one dares to be intimate with him. It’s a generalized feminine fear of crass exploitation by a male sex partner.

BTVS’ view of demons may properly be labeled a sociological interpretation, insofar as demons are taken as metonymic of the problems facing a whole group of people [modern bourgeois teens]. As we move over to Supernatural, we find that its view of demons may properly be labeled a psychological interpretation, insofar as the demons personify anxieties peculiar to the characters involved.

Season 2 shows some obvious examples of demons as psychodynamic figures, especially in the plot arc where Sam is worrying about being a “chosen child” according to the yellow-eyed demon. Being a chosen one or potential bad seed is not a problem endemic to modern bourgeois teens; by contrast, it’s a problem in Sam’s own head [and in Dean’s too because Dean hangs around with Sam]. Conveniently enough, many of the monsters that the brothers encounter exemplify Sam and Dean’s worries about Sam’s identity.

I mean, for God’s sake, season 2 gives us not one, but two, eps about shapeshifters: The Usual Suspects and Nightshifters. In both cases, people behave in unexpected ways, and the brothers must determine whether this unexpected behavior signifies a long-hidden part of someone’s true character or whether it means that someone is being exploited by malevolent forces. In Born Under a Bad Sign, the show’s psychodynamic interpretation of demons becomes explicit when Sam is possessed. While Sam thinks that the murders he committed when he was possessed indicate that he is truly a bad seed, Dean argues that the murders can be explained by an outside evil force: a demon. Avoiding the whole debate on free will that subserves this disagreement between the brothers, we can still clearly see that the demon is an excuse to debate Sam’s individual psychological problems: Does he have an unavoidably demonic [=evil] destiny, or can he overcome these tendencies to be a good person [the kind his brother thinks he is]?

It may also be pertinent that, in BTVS, the monsters inhabit a range of moral values [see, for example, Spike, who runs the gamut from gratuitously sadistic and BAD in season 2 to noble, self-sacrificing and GOOD in season 7], while, in Supernatural, they all exist on the BAD end of the moral scale. However, this is probably a separate essay.