Buffy The Vampire Slayer
For all the barbarous kills , supernatural confrontation , and bloodthirsty baddie thatBuffy the Vampire Slayerserved up over its seven - season run , the scariestBuffyepisode to me is the one I least expect . As someone who has grown up obsessing over the darkest corner of revulsion - from Cronenberg to Carpenter - I thought I was immune to the creepy curveballs that telecasting could throw my way . Then I saw “ Go Pisces the Fishes . ” Nestled late in season 2 , it ’s an episode most remember for being monster - of - the - week filler , but underneath the surface ( literally ) , it ’s a body horror incubus enshroud in plain sight . It ’s scarey , disturbing , and charge with effects that still obtain up today .
Buffy the lamia Slayeris best knownfor immix in high spirits school melodrama with the supernatural , but “ Go Pisces the Fishes ” lean firmly into genre horror , and it ’s all the better for it . What make the installment genuinely terrifying is n’t just the gore or the shift - it ’s the existential dread bubble beneath every scene . The virtual outcome are grotesque in all the right ways , and the episode ’s final twist is arguably one of the bleakest outcomes inBuffy the Vampire Slayerhistory . For a revulsion fan like me , “ Go Pisces ” is unforgettable for all the improper reasons .
Season 2’s “Go Fish” Is A Body Horror Masterpiece
Buffy Goes Full Cronenberg
Like many of the scariestBuffy the Vampire Slayerepisodes , “ Go Pisces ” start off deceptively tame . Sunnydale High ’s swim team is dead on a hot bar , and Principal Snyder wants to keep them happy , no matter how obnoxious they get . But soon , students start turning up dead ( or more accurately , ripped aside ) . The team is being picked off one by one , but in trueBuffyfashion , it ’s not what viewers think . Much to the shock of both fan and the Scooby Gang , the mutilate corpses were n’t the work of a demon or lusus naturae . They were the aftermath of something much , much more disturbing .
The body horror in “ Go Fish ” is played for shock , and it act . TheBuffyepisode ’s standout moment make out when Gage , played by a pre - Prison BreakWentworth Miller , undergoes a monstrous transformation . As Buffy follow in stunned repugnance , Gage peels his own hide off like a wetsuit , revealing a tricky , gilled fauna beneath . It ’s a here and now straight outof a David Cronenberg movie , one that ’s survive in my head ever since the episode first aired in 1998 . The practical effects are gruesome and tactile , the transformation unsettlingly slow , and the camera does n’t squinch .
The goliath themselves - hulking amphibian creature that seem like distant full cousin of the Gill - man fromCreature from the Black Lagoon- are a unfeigned victory of late-’90s TV effects . They ’re slimy , sinewy , and terrorize in the elbow room they move , dripping with threat and otherworldliness . There ’s something deeply uncomfortable about the idea that these creature used to be pupil , that these scaryBuffymonsters were human teenagers now monstrously re - engineered into something unrecognisable .
The best trunk revulsion movies get along from brilliant and far - out director who are hypnotized with the beautiful and disturbing nature of the human physical structure .
What ’s most disturbing is how “ Go Fish ” handles the alteration . It does n’t offer any kind of salvation or cure . These are n’t tike who made a high-risk decision and discover a deterrent example . They ’re victims of a system that put performance above manhood . That ’s part of what makes this arguably the scariestBuffyepisode : it does n’t just show horror - it come it to the most scary conclusion possible , with zero intention of soothe the spectator .
What Happens To The Sunnydale Swim Team Is Beyond Bleak
A Fate Too Horrifying To Forget
By the end of “ Go Fish , ” the full scope of the horror becomes light . The swim team did n’t just mutate - theybecamemonsters , permanently . After it ’s bring out that a shady Russian swim coach was drug the squad with Pisces deoxyribonucleic acid to enhance their performance , the irreversible effects have already take hold . The remaining members of the team , now in full transformed , escape into the ocean . That ’s it . There ’s no last - arcminute reversal , no larger-than-life save , no cure .
This is what cements “ Go Fish ” as perhapsthe scariestBuffyepisodeof all . Not only does it take a drear conception and advertise it to the edge , it commit to the most hopeless finish potential . The boys are simply proceed forever and a day . There ’s no exploit to recover them , no excited fallout , and worst of all , no one even seems to sorrow . These Kyd are written off , literally and figuratively , by their town , their school , and the show itself .
It ’s rare for a TV show to perpetrate to this layer of nakedness .
What really gets under my skin is the entire lack of law of closure . Buffyoften used ogre as metaphors , but this time , the metaphor is horrifyingly real . The swim squad is sacrificed to athletic succeeder and chemical substance shortcuts , and no one pay up the price except the victims themselves . There ’s no redemption , no justice - just a new life sentence as sea tool in the Brobdingnagian , uncaring ocean .
It ’s rare for a TV show to invest to this level of desolation . Most would offer some form of twist to unmake the psychic trauma , or at least turn to it in future episode . NotBuffy . “ Go Fish ” happens , and then it ’s never mentioned again . That muteness is deafening . It shit the revulsion feel all the more actual , like the lot of the Sunnydale High swim team is something too disturbing to talk about . As a horror fan , that ’s what stuck with me . I’ve ascertain people get behead , possessed , and flay alive in unnumbered movies , but something about “ Go Pisces the Fishes ” haunts me in a way those moving-picture show never did .
“Go Fish” Showed How Desensitized Sunnydale Had Become
No One In Sunnydale Seems To Care That An Entire Team Of Kids Just Vanished
What might be the scariest part of “ Go Fish ” is n’t even the monsters , it ’s the backwash . Or , more accurately , thelackof one . By the time the course credit seethe , the schooling ’s championship - gain swimming team has literally turned into fish monsters and swum aside forever , and nobody bats an eye .
There ’s no memorial avail , no news reportage , not even a throwaway line in a laterBuffyepisode . It ’s as if suffer half a dozen students is justanother hebdomad in Sunnydale . While the show often played tight and loose with its monster - of - the - week format , “ Go Fish ” quietly highlight something deeply unsettling : Sunnydale ’s resident physician are numb to tragedy . After so many supernatural events , the community does n’t just tolerate revulsion - they disregard it entirely .
If you ’re a kid grow up in Sunnydale , you ’re not just fighting lamia , you ’re fighting apathy .
That desensitization is terrify . If you ’re a kid produce up in Sunnydale , you ’re not just fighting vampires , you ’re fighting apathy . The idea that your schoolfellow can vanish into the ocean as actual monsters and nobody will care is chilling on a profoundly human storey . It reframes the episode ’s horror , making the existent monster not just what ’s in the water , but what ’s happening on land .
That ’s why , even with all the gory transformation and eerie creatures , the endure apprehension of “ Go Pisces ” is rooted in its secrecy . That , to me , is real horror . It ’s what makes it not just among the scariestBuffy the Vampire Slayerepisodes I ’ve seen , but the scariest show or movies full stop .
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