10 Best Monsters Of The Week In Buffy The Vampire Slayer
7. Der Kindestod
Everything about Der Kindestod is just...wrong. The design of this demon is nothing short of traumatic for viewers of all ages, and its (his?) impact on the Season Two episode "Killed by Death" is simply bleak. "Kindestod" as a name manages to be horrifying: it means "the child's death" in German.
Set up in hospital after a bad bout of flu, Buffy realises that the younger children on her ward are being terrorised by a demon that absorbs the life force from sick children in order to survive. To make matters worse, and much more personal, this very demon may have been the thing that killed Buffy's sick cousin, Celia, when they were kids, prompting Buffy's phobia of hospitals.
Watching Der Kindestod skulk around the hospital and haunt Buffy's nightmares is skin-crawling horror at its best, and the fact that its target is children makes it a true embodiment of demonic evil. When Buffy finally manages to track it down and kill it, it's a sigh of relief of everyone involved.
Few monsters on the show deserved death to come to them more.