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By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
Buffy the Vampire Slayer more than a popular urban fantasy show. It was a TV series that transformed the TV landscape with its crackling writing even as it made us fall in love with its eclectic characters. Perhaps none of those characters were more fascinating than Spike James Marsters, who enters the show as a soulless and selfish vampire and ends the series heroically sacrificing himself to save the world a lot Buffy fans have wished Spike was real, and maybe he is … at least, that’s what some fans are saying after a Redditor discovered a perfect Spike like in a Joy Division documentary.
The Real Spike
This story begins on r/Buffy (the head Buffy the Vampire Slayer subreddit), where u/PotentialLanguage685 posted images of Spike’s all-too-real look. The user had been watching a 2007 documentary Department of Joy which focused on the band of the same name and included many clips from the late 70s. And the user took pictures of this Spike doppelganger who appeared on the screen during a montage highlighting the punk scene of that time in the UK.
At this point, it is worth emphasizing that this nameless man does not look simple James Marstersthe actor who brought our favorite bad boy vampire to life. Rather, this Buffy The fan noted how much the man looked like Spike himself, making it seem like this vampire may have once existed in the real world. And after he posted the photos, fans scrambled to point out the irony that this guy didn’t necessarily look like Spike…instead, Spike was deliberately designed to look like this type of figure archetypal punk.
For one thing, Buffy show runner Joss Whedon wanted Spike to be based on the real punk scene it would later become Department of Joy a document so lovingly captured. In a previous interview, Whedon explained that he wanted his vampiric creation to be an “English punk rock vampire.” That required a makeover and some voice training from the real Englishman Anthony Stewart Head, and all the work on a British accent was doubly ironic because Marsters was originally heard with a thick Louisiana accent that would have been more at home in True Blood.
On that Buffy subreddit, many fans discussed how the unnamed man looked like the fictional Spike and the real-life music legend Billy Idol. As many of those fans already knew, Spike’s look in the show was deliberately modeled after Idol, so much so that we later had a fun conversation about how Idol stole his look from Spike rather than the other way around. But in the real world, Idol’s look was more inspired by groups like the Sex Pistols, who bring things full circle: Joss Whedon wanted Spike to be more like Sid Vicious and Marsters insisted the he should be more like Johnny Rotten.
Sad enough to Buffy fans everywhere, Spike isn’t really real. If he was, half of them would be constantly lusting after him and the other half would be screaming at him for season 6. But this unknown stranger in a Joy Division documentary is proof that the various influences from our world which led to Spike’s creation that was all too real. In that sense, well… you could say that the real William the Bloody was inside us all along.
