Mister Furious
Writer David Fury on Angel, Buffy, and brains.
      by Lisa Kincaid

The Buffy cast early in season four.

David Fury enjoys his work more than your average person, and with good reason: he gets paid to write for the WB's Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spin-off, Angel. It's a position many fans and aspiring screenwriters would consider enviable, but if you want Fury's job, you'd have to get rid of him first, and that's easier said than done.

"You'll have to pry my dead, rotting corpse from my office chair to get me out of here," he firmly proclaims. Then he adds: "Oh, did I mention... I'm a dead, rotting corpse."

And if being a member of the undead club weren't enough in the way of qualifications to write for a show like Buffy, David Fury has the kind of background that makes him practically born for the gig. A native of Denton, Texas (which, as he points out, was the location of The Rocky Horror Picture Show), Fury was raised on the east coast, in Old Bethpage, New York. He grew up on a steady diet of two of the things that make Buffy a bonafide hit: horror and comedy. Firesign Theatre, Monty Python, National Lampoon and George Carlin were among his favorites as a lad, along with horror and sci fi classics like The Twilight Zone, The Invaders, Star Trek, The Immortal and Dark Shadows.

"When I was away at Summer camp," Fury recalls, "my mother used to write me every day with the plot synopsis of that day's Dark Shadows episode." Now that's dedication.

"Horror's always been a passion of mine," he continues. "Like most kids growing up on Long Island, I spent my Saturday nights flipping back and forth between Creature Features on Channel 5 and Chiller Theater on Channel 11. My favorites were It! The Terror From Beyond Space -- which Alien ripped off -- and Fiend Without A Face, about killer parasite brains that used their spinal cords to crawl along the ground."

"Brains are a very big motif with me," he notes. "Probably because I envy those who have them."

Sure. Nice cover story. But I see right through it. Fury, who has already admitted to being a dead, rotting corpse, is obviously a zombie. And as we all know, zombies eat brains. So that explains that.

"I actually keep one in a jar in my office," Fury adds. Well, even zombies get the munchies.

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