Sunnydale

Sunnydale, California is the fictional suburban setting for the popular television drama Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Series creator Joss Whedon conceived the town as a representation of the typical, anonymous, generic suburban city, as well as a narrative parody of the all-too-serene towns typical in traditional horror movies.

Sunnydale is designed largely for comic effect and narrative convenience. With a population of 38,500, it has one high school but nineteen gothic cemeteries, and despite having only one modest main street, it sports a campus of the University of California system, many dark alleyways, abandoned mansions and factories, and an airport. It is located along the coast, near beaches and forests and is a short drive from a desert. Sunnydale possesses many common horror-movie characteristics, most notably the divide between its demon-fighting, supernaturally aware teens and the sinister or clueless, perpetually in-denial adults.

Sunnydale is "located" ambiguously between Los Angeles and Santa Barbara. The fictional high school which was originally the centerpiece of the series is located on a "Hellmouth," a portal between our world and the darker demon dimensions, which serves as a nexus and attracting point for all manner of evil creatures and happenings. The hellmouth serves both as a narrative conceit and one of the central metaphors of the show, which specializes in drawing supernatural elements as analogies for the difficulties of adolescence.

Spoiler warning: Plot or ending details follow.

Besides Sunnydale High School, which, burned down during a fight between the students and the town's mayor, after his "ascension" to pure demon form, was later rebuilt in a more modernistic design, teens congregated at the town's only club, The Bronze, where Daniel ("Oz") Osbourne and the other members of the rock band "Dingoes Ate My Baby" used to play. Buffy Summers and Willow Rosenberg occasionally repaired to the Espresso Pump, a local coffee shop, to drink lattes and cappuccinos, and she and Angel attended a movie at the Sun Cinema.

Buffy's mother, Joyce, owned an art gallery in Sunnydale, and Buffy's Watcher, Rupert Giles, was the Sunnydale High School librarian until the building burned down, after which he bought The Magic Box, which offered lotions, potions, and other supplies to witches, sorcerers, and other practitioners of the mystical arts. An old acquaintance of Giles', the warlock Ethan Rayne, operated an enchanted costume shop in Sunnydale until he was run out of town by Giles.

Angel lived in a deserted mansion, which he shared, for a time with Spike and Drusilla, after the three moved there from the abandoned factory in which they'd lived previously. For a time, Buffy and Willow attended UC Sunnydale. The rogue Slayer, Faith, lived in the Sunnydale Motel until the mayor rented her an apartment in a more upscale section of the city.

As college students, Buffy, Willow, and her other friends discovered that the U.S. government was operating a secret military complex, The Initiative, that it had installed beneath the UC Sunnydale campus.

After dropping out, Buffy worked at a fast-food restaurant, the Doublemeat Palace, before landing a job as a youth counselor at the new Sunnydale High School, which her sister, Dawn, attended. Buffy's friend, Xander Harris, worked at a number of jobs in Sunnydale before becoming a construction foreman, helping to build the new Sunnydale High School, and Cordelia Chase worked at a local boutique for a short time before relocating to Los Angeles, following graduation.

While there is no exact real-life counterpart for Sunnydale in California, theories exist that it is closest in nature to Santa Cruz. In several episodes of the fourth season, when Buffy is attending university at the University of California, Sunnydale, Kresge and Stevenson Colleges are mentioned as part of the UC Sunnydale campus. Both Kresge and Stevenson are colleges on the campus of University of California, Santa Cruz.