Horror probably wasn’t what the folks at Rolling Stone had in mind when they designated Buffy as television’s coolest show. Their thoughts centered around "the clothes," "the attitude," the action, and, of course, "the hot, steamy sex."

For those unfamiliar with the show, Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, which is based on an eponymous 1992 film, tells the story of a young woman named Buffy Summers. Around her sixteenth birthday Buffy learns that she is the latest fulfillment of an ancient prophecy that goes "In every generation there is a chosen one. She alone will stand against the vampires, the demons and the forces of darkness. She is the slayer."

Every week, Buffy and her friends do battle against a collection of outlandish monsters, usually with the fate of the world, or at least her fictional hometown of Sunnydale, California, hanging in the balance. Despite the references to "chosen one" and "forces of darkness," the show really isn’t about the fight between good and evil. It’s about the interior life of young men and women: their responsibilities, their relationships and the consequences of their actions and choices.

Notice that I said "consequences," not "rightness" or "morality." That’s the way Joss Whedon, the show’s creator, intends it. As he told Rolling Stone, "On a horror show, if you do something — anything — you are going to be punished for it. I’m not out to say [sex is] bad. And I’m not out to say, ‘Everybody go have sex now.’" In other words, Whedon understands that sex, in particular, sex between unmarried young people, is a morally significant act, but he can’t, or won’t, bring himself to pass judgment on it.

And that moral ambivalence is why, despite whatever Whedon might consider his creation to be, Buffy is a horror show, albeit a quirky, postmodern kind of horror show. In his new book, Monsters From The Id: The Rise of Horror in Fiction and Film, cultural critic E. Michael Jones writes that horror is both "a sign that we don’t know what is bothering us" and "a sign that we don’t want to know to know what is bothering us."

By "what is bothering us," Jones is referring to a sense that the worldview and accompanying morality that supplanted the Judeo-Christian worldview and morality not only violates the laws that govern the universe, but is also the source of much suffering and evil. Jones traces the rise of modern horror to the Enlightenment’s "[tearing down] of those institutions that has regulated human behavior." In their place, the Enlightenment substituted human reason — a reason that, as Jones writes, "could do nothing to prevent [itself] from disintegrating into and justifying pure desire, even destructive desire." In other words, without Christianity, there was nothing to keep Western man from acting on his worst impulses, and what’s more, rationalizing those impulses.

Thus, as Jones contends, personal liberation, among the notables of the Enlightenment, was understood in largely sexual terms. Among those notables were Mary Wollstonecraft, a proto-feminist and devotee of the French Revolution, and William Godwin, her husband, who shared her enthusiasm for the events in Paris. Wollstonecraft went to Paris not only to witness political revolution, but to flout the sexual morality that still governed her native England. Godwin, for his part, called marriage "the most odious of all monopolies." It was their daughter, Mary Godwin Shelley, who wrote the first modern work of horror: Frankenstein.

When she was 16, Mary came under the influence of the poet Percy Shelley. Shelly embodied the new philosophy of sexual liberation. In fact, he had left his wife precisely because she refused to go along with his demands for sexual experimentation. He found a willing partner in Mary. Mary and the still-married Shelley ran off together. (They eventually married after Shelley’s first wife killed herself.) It was during their time together that Mary learned, through painful personal experience, the human costs associated with the new ethos of liberation. She learned that nothing or no one would stand between Shelley and his desire for sexual gratification. She was passed to Shelley’s friends like a plaything. She became a part of a ménage a trois that included her own sister. And, if personal humiliation and degradation weren’t bad enough, Mary watched as Shelley’s quest for liberation led two women, including her own half-sister, to take their own lives. This left her feeling both remorseful and repulsed.

Mary was caught between a moral radicalism she couldn’t embrace without feeling guilty, and the Christian moral tradition that her parents, as well as her husband, had rejected. Her response was Frankenstein. The horror story about the awful consequences of man’s attempt to play God became the vehicle by which her revulsion and regrets toward the Enlightenment’s moral ethos could be expressed. The Monster became the symbol of the parade of horribles that the Enlightenment — with its aspiration to replace the biblical God, especially His moral law, with one more to its liking — had unleashed upon the world. But instead of acknowledging guilt and error in a straightforward manner, the acknowledgement was expressed symbolically and unconsciously. As Jones puts it, "horror involves both the result [of the actions Mary witnessed] and the inability to face the moral cause." Stated colloquially, it’s way of saying "this new morality stinks!" without losing your credentials as part of the avant garde.

This pattern has held up since Mary Shelley’s time. Whether it’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the 1950s classic Forbidden Planet, Ridley Scott’s Alien, or more recently Mimic, movies whose ostensible purpose was to scare us end up serving as indictments of the morality, in particular, the sexual morality, our culture has inherited from our Enlightenment forebears. Which brings us back to Buffy, The Vampire Slayer. If Jones is right, and he makes a very good case, what horror is being depicted by Whedon’s creation?

Whedon is right when says that the assorted monsters represent "what you go through in high school" and now, college. But the "what" in question isn’t teen angst or alienation. It’s the moral and personal hazards that await people who are being sent into the world without a coherent set of beliefs, values, and standards. Their parents, often more intent on being their friends rather than their parents, are like Whedon: They’re aware that certain actions, in particular sex, can have deleterious consequences, but unwilling to deliver unequivocal messages about right and wrong. The world Buffy inhabits is remarkably adult-free. Her dad has never been depicted; her mom, Joyce, while depicted, was, for a long time, clueless about what Buffy did at night. (Interestingly, she was the only one who thought that sex was a big deal. It doesn’t come as a surprise that as sex played a bigger role in the show, mom was essentially written out altogether.) And her mentor, Giles, while a committed soldier in the war against evil, is indifferent to the sexual practices of his charge. (He sleeps with his own out-of-town girlfriend on her occasional visits.)

Like Frankenstein, Buffy is a commentary on the failure and incoherence of our culture’s values and beliefs. Week after week, the show reminds us that evil is real, that the world is a dangerous place, and that most high schoolers and collegians haven’t been given tools adequate to deal with it. This is why Buffy and company, instead of combating evil with the tools provided by the biblical God, or any other honest-to-goodness religion, resort to old books written in Sumerian and even witchcraft. Since horror comes from an a priori rejection of the Christian tradition, superstition is all that’s left.

Now, like Mary Shelly before him, Whedon doesn’t intend Buffy to be this kind of commentary. But this misinterpretation of one’s own work is common among the creators of horror. You might call it, to borrow a phrase from Boundless contributor, J. Budziszewski, "the revenge of conscience." Jones cites no less an authority than Martin Scorcese who, in an article about horror filmmaker David Cronenberg, said that the Canadian director didn’t really understand his own work. A recent episode of Buffy indicates that Whedon is just as much in the dark. While Buffy and her boyfriend are having sex, all hell literally breaks lose. At the end of the show, Buffy describes her sexual activity as being caused by the demons, when anyone who had watched the previous 55 minutes would know that the opposite was true. Despite the artist’s not knowing, and not wanting to know, "what is bothering us," the truth will come out.

Now that we’ve identified the monsters, how do we vanquish them? By doing what Mary Shelley and apparently Whedon couldn’t bring themselves to do: Embrace the Christian moral vision that the Enlightenment’s morality supplanted. While we can’t turn back the clock to the mid-eighteenth century, we can personally reject that morality. That involves investing ourselves in institutions that, as Jones put it, help "regulate human behavior," such as the Church and our families. We can become aware of the shoddy bill of goods regarding moral matters that our culture is trying to sell us. You’ve got a better chance of killing the monsters if you take your cues from folks like J. Budziszewski than from pop culture mavens such as Joss Whedon.

Because clothes, coolness, and attitude won’t go far against the real monsters you’re up against.