throbbing light machine

Interesting! I didn't watch Buffy until I was in college - in fact, I may have actually read Carol Clover's work on gender, horror, and the Final Girl before I watched Buffy - because I was brought up without a tv. But I remember having to get a lot of explanations when I read The Scarlet Letter as a kid, and I bet it was similar - you can tell there's something big there, something weird, but you don't have the cultural context to understand all the knurdles and permutations and elisions that are going on, so you just end up with this confusing impression of hidden intensity.