Welcome to the Hellmouth

"Welcome to the Hellmouth" is the series premiere of the American supernatural drama television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It originally aired on The WB on March 10, 1997 in a two-hour premiere along with the following episode, "The Harvest". The episode was written by the series creator and executive producer Joss Whedon and directed by Charles Martin Smith. "Welcome to the Hellmouth" received a Nielsen rating of 3.4 upon its original airing and received largely positive reviews from critics.

Picking up where the feature film left off, Buffy Summers and her mom move to Sunnydale, California, for a fresh start, unaware of the evil lurking in this quiet suburb. Somewhat reluctant in her role as the Slayer, Buffy quickly makes friends and enemies at her new school. While also meeting her new "Watcher," Giles, the mercurial school librarian, her newly assembled team encounters the ever-abundant unearthly creatures in Sunnydale.^[2]

Joss Whedon developed Buffy the Vampire Slayer to invert the Hollywood formula of "the little blonde girl who goes into a dark alley and gets killed in every horror movie." The series was created after the 1992 film of the same name, in an attempt by Whedon to stay truer to his original ideas. Whedon wrote and directed a 25-minute unaired pilot in 1996, some of the dialogue and story of which was reused in the episode. Many scenes were filmed on location in Los Angeles, California. The high school used for external and some internal scenes in the series is Torrance High School, the same school used for the series Beverly Hills, 90210.