Sarah Michelle Gellar said she was drawn to “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” because of its focus on mental health. She told THR:
“I’ve always said that one of my favorite things about ‘Buffy’ was the utilization of the monsters being metaphors for the horrors of high school, of adolescence. By the way, I just said to my daughter the other day, ‘Seventh grade sucks, it just really does.’ I said, ‘I’ll tell you right now, I’ve been alive a long time and I’ve had a lot of bad in my life. I’ve lost a lot of people. I still think the worst year of my life is probably seventh grade.’ So that says something, right?”
Well, that is intense and very true for a whole lot of us. Gellar continued, “Instead of using the monsters for adolescents, we were using the monsters for the modern-day pains that we have, which is the anxiety of life and how stressful life has really become for everybody, at every age.” She used the example of the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic and compared the idea of a pack to the “pods” many of us were attempting to stay in for safety and companionship. She said:
“And then you add on top of it, the commentary on the planet that he’s making, and you realize that there’s a bigger picture. What I really learned the last couple of years is that supernatural stories, in a really odd way, allow you to tell the most superhuman stories.”
All eight episodes of “Wolf Pack” season 1 are currently streaming on Paramount+.