Entertainment
Buffy’s Most Heartbreaking Plot Twist Was Inspired By History's Darkest Devil Story
By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel is a character stricken by a very specific curse: as a vampire, one of his victims’ families gives him his soul back, forcing him to constantly experience the crushing guilt of everyone he has ever hurt or killed. To make things worse, there was a catch to this curse that served to twist the knife in Angel’s heart. Specifically, if he ever experiences a moment of true happiness, he would lose his soul and once again become Angelus, one of the scariest vampires the planet had ever known.
All of this makes Angel (played by David Boreanaz) one of the most complex and fascinating characters in television history, and many Buffy fans have wondered where showrunner Joss Whedon got the idea for this gut-wrenching curse. But you don’t have to look far to discover the answer: as it turns out, Whedon drew inspiration from one of the most famous stories in all of literature. You see, Angel’s curse is very similar to what we see in the tale of Faust, better known as the original “deal with the devil” story.
What A Terrible Night For A Curse
If your memories of English class are a little fuzzy, here’s a quick primer: Faust was originally a German legend about a man who, despite his success, simply wanted more out of life. In order to get it, he made a deal with the devil in which he would get all of the worldly knowledge and pleasures that he could ever want. But after a life of experiencing what amounted to Heaven on Earth, his soul would go straight to Hell once he died.
Multiple authors have adapted this German folktale, and the most famous was created by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. He added his own twists to Faust’s pact with the devil, including Faust making a very special wager: he will become a servant in Hell only if the Devil can provide him with a moment of true happiness that he would want to last forever. This unexpectedly happens when Faust begins dreaming of people working together to make the world a better place; this moment of happiness damns his soul, but he is effectively saved by God, who rewards Faust with salvation because of his righteous dream of human harmony.
The Most Tortured Vampire In History
Needless to say, there is plenty of parallelism between what happens to Goethe’s Faust and what happens to Angel in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Once his soul is restored, Angel does his best to atone for all the terrible acts that he committed as a vampire. But once he experiences a moment of true happiness (which happened, awkwardly enough, during sex with Buffy), he loses his soul, becoming once more a terrible monster who damns himself with each transgressive act.
Arguably, Angel is also the beneficiary of the same divine grace that saved Faust: after losing his soul and becoming Angelus, he enacts a plan meant to plunge the entire world into Hell. Buffy stops him, but only after Willow successfully restores his soul. This leads to the most heartbreaking moment in the entire series, in which Buffy has to kill the only man she has ever loved, sending him to a hell dimension in order to save every human on the planet.
Saved By The Spell
He is inexplicably resurrected in Season 3, and there is never an official explanation given for who or what brings him back from Hell. But one very prominent fan theory is that he was brought back by The Powers That Be, the same mysterious group of cosmic powerhouses who ensured Angel met Buffy. Later, they gave prophetic visions to Doyle, the demon who helped Angel become a champion of the helpless once he moved to Los Angeles.
Angel was originally condemned to Hell thanks to a very Faustian curse, and he may have been saved in the same way: by divine powers that rewarded his dream of making the world a better place. Either way, it’s clear that the tale of the most iconic vampire in Buffy the Vampire Slayer was influenced by the original deal with the devil story, one that has been influencing storytellers for centuries. Even though most fans never clocked it, this means that the hottest TV show of the ‘90s is forever connected to a German folktale that became popular nearly 500 years ago!