“Buffy vs. Dracula”, the season-five premiere of *Buffy the Vampire Slayer*, turns one of fiction’s most revered vampires into a deliberately campy and underwhelming adversary. Its importance lies in how it uses Dracula to explore Buffy’s growing attraction to darkness, her loss of innocence and the changing nature of her identity as a Slayer, while also rejecting the idea that she is a passive victim needing rescue.

The episode closely adapts elements from Bram Stoker’s *Dracula*: the Count transforms into a bat and wolf, controls minds, Xander becomes a Renfield-like servant, Giles encounters vampiric brides and Buffy briefly falls under Dracula’s thrall like Mina Harker. However, she quickly resists him, stakes him twice and saves herself before Riley can intervene, making the episode’s gender politics as significant as its jokes. Dracula’s old-fashioned manner and patriarchal assumptions clash with Sunnydale’s modern world, allowing the show to redefine him as both a comic outsider and a serious symbol of Buffy’s increasingly complex relationship with violence and power.