By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
While the titular hero of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is an expert at staking vamps, that doesn’t mean they never scare her. For example, the Season 1 episode “Nightmares” confirmed that Buffy’s biggest fear was being buried alive by The Master, a kind of archvampire and the show’s first Big Bad. While all fans are familiar with that memorable episode, most don’t realize that Buffy actor Sarah Michelle Gellar shares her character’s biggest fear of being buried alive.
Buffy And Sarah’s Biggest Fear
We know about Gellar’s fears thanks to a 1998 interview with Rolling Stone where she elaborated on “Nightmares.” According to the Buffy star, she shares her character’s biggest fear because she is irrationally scared “of cemeteries and being buried alive.” In fact, she even tried to wriggle out of filming the scene with The Master, but thanks to “miscommunication,” she ended up shooting that story beat anyway and reawakening her old trauma.
In the words of Buffy’s lead actor, she had to experience her character’s biggest fear because her initial objection to the producer “never got relayed,” possibly due to just how late they were filming. As Gellar remembers, it was “four in the morning, and “they basically made me do it.” Unlike the characters in “Nightmares,” facing her own fear didn’t help the actor conquer it…instead, she “was hysterical” during filming and now looks back with dread on that infamous shoot.
If you’re a longtime fan of the show, then you know that this series has plenty of stunts and other dangerous moments that could instantly ruin an actor’s day (if not their life) should something go wrong. Despite that, though, Gellar remembers this as “one of the hardest things I’ve ever done for my job, ever.” She might have Buffy’s biggest fear, but the fact that Gellar made it through the shoot and made the scene look so convincing is proof that she also has the Slayer’s courage in the face of adversity.
Just how hard was it for Sarah Michelle Gellar to bring Buffy’s biggest fear to life? She noted that she “cried the whole way home” about the “horrible” experience, but the actor still maintained a sense of humor about this harrowing tale. “It’s really hard to be a vampire slayer if you’re scared of cemeteries,” she said.
Another way that Gellar maintained her sense of humor about all of this is by contrasting herself with some of her show’s spookier fans. As she pointed out, “some people find cemeteries a turn-on,” so much so that they “like sex in cemeteries.” However, this entire scene was her own nightmare come true because it combined her two biggest phobias: cemeteries and getting buried alive.
Interestingly, Buffy the Vampire Slayer never really returned to the topic of the character’s biggest fear. In subsequent seasons, we would see Gellar’s character face a giant snake, a cyborg, a god. Heck, we see her keep one apocalypse after another from tearing the entire world apart. But Buffy herself rarely gets buried alive like in “Nightmares”…unfortunately, the character does spend a lot of time in cemeteries, which means Gellar had to continue facing at least one of her greatest fears on a regular basis.
Knowing that Buffy’s actor shares the character’s greatest fear honestly gives “Nightmares” a bit more resonance. It was already one of the show’s better Season 1 episodes, but knowing that it forced Gellar to fight her own fears has given us new respect for one of Hollywood’s greatest actors. As for us, we’re not all that scared of being buried alive because we share Xander’s greatest fear: killer clowns.
