When I was young, I would watch the show Buffy the Vampire Slayer with stunning alacrity. It was, and is still, a terrific series: a sometimes cheesy — though not unpalatably so, at least to the extent that one is willing to indulge in more than a bit of camp — teen drama where high school existence for the characters of Sunnydale, California is not about life encumbered by pimples and prom pictures so much as it is about one beleaguered by vampires and demons as well. Sunnydale High School operates atop a portal to hell called, quite aptly, simply, a Hellmouth — from whence spring the forces of darkness to which Buffy has been designated custodian.

Most of Buffy was shot in L.A. and on Olympic Boulevard in Santa Monica, California, and the show features many landmarks familiar from other instances of high profile teen TV and film, such as the pretty, all-American stucco facade of Sunnydale High School — in reality, Torrence High School — which appears also in establishing shots of choice for the high school scenes in Beverly Hills, 90210 (both the 90s-era incarnation as well as the CW spin-off) and She’s All That, among notable others.

Sarah Michelle Gellar plays Buffy, who is tasked with intercepting all the unsavory creatures, as they unfurl from the Hellmouth, and mopping them out of the way. And with the series having begun in the nineties, before even Swiffer existed, much of this aspect of the show can feel, at times, dated; in fact, many of the special effects which must have seemed convincing and innovative in 1997 appear rather cartoonish in 2016. But technical details such as these are of hardly any matter, because Buffy tends to prevail as a show on the merit of its writing, which is prescient.

Because Buffy is a show not only about body counts and the occult; it is, often enough, an allegory for the way most of us felt about the rite-of-passage that was high school: that confusing, liminal stage fraught with hormones and heartbreak and angst, so unbearable as to verge on the demonic, so awful that it felt like hell. Buffy goes to battle against the supernatural and the adolescent under one rooftop — in a sun-drenched Sunnydale, California that is an all but happy place — and somehow still manages to find reason enough to wake up in the morning; despite all that should pull this character in a thousand other directions, Buffy finds a way to survive the vagaries of adolescence. Looking back at my own experience of high school, I’m not quite so sure how I managed to do the same.