the Vampire Slayer: The Album, Radio Sunnydale, the "Once More, with Feeling" Soundtrack, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Score. Episodes Inspirations and metaphors During the first year of the series, Whedon described the show as "My So-Called Life with The X-Files". My So-Called Life gave a sympathetic portrayal of teen anxieties; in contrast, The X-Files delivered a supernatural "monster of the week" story line. Alongside these series, Whedon has cited cult film Night of the Comet as a "big influence", and credited the X-Men character Kitty Pryde as a significant influence on the character of Buffy. The authors of the unofficial guidebook Dusted point out that the series was often a pastiche, borrowing elements from previous horror novels, movies, and short stories and from such common literary stock as folklore and mythology. Nevitt and Smith describe Buffys use of pastiche as "postmodern Gothic". For example, the Adam character parallels the Frankenstein monster, the episode "Bad Eggs" parallels Invasion of the Body Snatchers, "Out of Mind, Out of Sight" parallels The Invisible Man, and so on. Buffy episodes often include a deeper meaning or metaphor as well. Whedon explained, "We think very carefully about what we're trying to say emotionally, politically, and even philosophically while we're writing it... it really is, apart from being a pop-culture phenomenon, something that is deeply layered textually episode by episode." Academics Wilcox and Lavery provide examples of how a few episodes deal with real life issues turned into supernatural metaphors: The love affair between the vampire Angel and Buffy was fraught with metaphors. For example, their night of passion cost the vampire his soul. Sarah Michelle Gellar said: "That's the ultimate metaphor. You sleep with a guy and he turns bad on you." Buffy struggles throughout the series with her calling as Slayer and the loss of freedom this entails, frequently sacrificing teenage experiences for her Slayer duties. Her difficulties and eventual empowering realizations are reflections of several dichotomies faced by modern women and echo feminist issues within society. In the episode "Becoming (Part 2)", when Joyce learns that Buffy is the Slayer, her reaction has strong echoes of a parent discovering her child is gay, including denial, suggesting that she tries "not being a Slayer", before ultimately kicking Buffy out of the house. Casting In 1996, Katie Holmes and Selma Blair were in the running for the role of Buffy. Holmes was too