31 Days of Horror Reviews Day FINAL: Twilight

Day 31: Twilight (2008), dir. by Catherine Hardwicke

Streaming Availability: Rental

Happy Halloween!!! We conclude Spooky Month with the SCARY, most SPINECHILLING, most OUTRAGIOUSLY HORRIFYING chaste young adult romance movie, Twilight. After a month of vampires as a metaphor for desire, queerness, feminism, religious agony, class consciousness, and escapism, we find ourselves with the Nosferatu standing in for… abstinence? The vampires do play baseball, so somebody is getting to second base, just not Edward. He doesn't drink... wine, because he's still in high school and follows the rules.

Today all that remains are the scars in the Earth from where the shells exploded and the trench lines were dug. But we can easily remember that not long ago, Twilight was a Very Big Deal, big in a way that movies almost never are anymore. This was enormously important as a culture touchstone, launching a decade of YA romance in theaters. Not just more vampire love triangle, but Twilight sets the stage for things like Hunger Games and Fifty Shades of Grey. It was also something you Needed to Have an Opinion About.

Twilight was incredibly popular, but also drew just as huge of an Anti-Fandom. This was an era where mass culture instinctively despised any media marketed to girls, be that sparkly vampires or Justin Bieber. The backlash is retrospect is utterly ridiculous. In 2008, the height of internet discourse around film was an obsession with Trash. It was a leftover of the Mystery Science Theater 3000 run, which had continued into RiffTrax (they did indeed riff on Twilight). Beyond the professionals, there was a real hunger to find the worst movies and tear them to pieces. Films like The Room became massive memes. Twilight had the bad luck of being a popular Girls Thing, while also considered hysterically bad, and it also annoyed horror fans because it made vampires Not Scary Enough.

Where did this author stand? Well, you can look back and see that some of my very first pieces of writing about movies were trashing the Twilight sequels and their imitators. I was as bad as anybody in what was terrible overreaction, which let's be honest, was deeply sexist and probably also homophobic. Even without serious labels it was all deeply shitty and being shitty is a bad place to start analytically if you’re going to review movies, no matter the reason. (But I’ll give myself some credit: I did enjoy the fourth and fifth Twilight Saga movies and I still think Beautiful Creatures is an underrated gem.)

So now, in 2022, I’ll just come out and say it. Stephenie Meyer, Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Catherine Hardwicke and all the other directors, and all the fans: I am sorry.

Anyway, considering all that baggage, is Twilight 1 any good?

Well… no. As an experience, I cannot say I recommend it. But let us remember I’m the kind of guy that goes to the movies to see horny tragedies like Thirst or stylish mood pieces like The Hunger or incredible tableaus of artistic horror like Bram Stoker’s Dracula. I’m not sitting around here waiting for a boy to whisk me off my feet (ignore how much that makes me sound like a stock romantic comedy protagonist). Once Twilight is no longer the Greatest Thing of All Time or the Worst Thing of All Time, once the tempers are cooled, the movie is just… kinda boring. I thought I was an hour into this movie and it turns out I was only twenty-four minutes in.

You know the story by now. Twilight is about Bella Swan (Stewart), a quiet, guarded teenage girl who has moved to a small town in the foggy Pacific Northeast to live with her father, Charlie (Billy Burke). Everybody in her new school is very welcoming, but none are interesting to Bella except for Edward Cullen (Pattinson), a pale boy with perfectly quaffed hair. Upon first seeing Bella, Edward does a double-take and his paper on his desk shoots upward in a hysterical erection gag, however, later he seems to be incapable of handling her presence without gagging. Turns out Edward is a friendly vegetarian vampire with psychic powers, and Bella is uniquely special because 1) her blood smells so damn good she’s Edward’s "own personal brand of heroin", and 2) uniquely amongst all people, he cannot read her mind.

It is amazing to me how those last two bullet points were the subject of so much acrimony as to whether Bella was a "Mary Sue" back in 2008. Do people even care about the Mary Sue discourse anymore? We were all so worried about that shit, whether fictional characters were breaking some kind of narratorial metagame, and now with, turns out, none of that matters at all. Let people enjoy their harmless fantasies. Let people enjoy harmless, basically edgeless vampires too if that's what they want, who cares?

Gundam Wing proved this back in 1995, the best way into a young girl’s heart is to promise to kill her, thus Edwards’s creepy undead affections are irresistible. Soon enough, Edward and Bella are sharing moments like a hysterically cheesy sequence with Edward playing the piano in a sweeping camera pan like a soft rock music video. Then they're flying through the trees, or sleeping next to each other with no hanky panky – leave room for the Holy Spirit, kids. This does lead to more exciting moments like superpowered vampire baseball with Edward’s coven family, which is actually a lot of fun. However, all events leads to a thoroughly mid action climax where an evil vampire, James (Cam Gigandet) is a thoroughly unimpressive Movie 1 villain.

Twilight 1 does not introduce any of the baroque vampire politics of the later movies. The great love triangle that would define the franchise is barely here, since Jacob (Taylor Lautner) is barely in this. We get a tease of wolves but no Werewolf vs Vampire conflicts yet. No Michael Sheen as an incredibly hammy Italian vampire king. Plenty of awkward teenage pauses in conversations to fill up the running time though, which I do not think is unauthentic. It does not stop the movie from being disappointing. At two hours, there's very little movie in this movie.

Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson do not lack chemistry here, yet it is all this chilly, pained courting. High school romance sucks even in the movies, turns out. How did anybody survive those years without dying of awkwardness, I'll never know. The attraction is there, even if they have to sell it with Bella biting her lip constantly. Most movie romances are slick and effortless. Twilight is instead about young people who could not be more insecure with their bodies. Maybe that’s actually what this vampirism metaphor is for. I guessed in the first paragraph this had a  Christian edge, but I think I’m wrong now. Maybe it is more a fear of sex itself, being terrified of your urges and sharing them with other people.

A few line reads come off as wooden, yet I wouldn’t call either performance "bad". I'll admit I'm biased now since both of these actors went on to have fascinating, diverse careers showing a ton of range. I never would have guessed in 2008 when I was ragging on this movie that one day Edward would be a really great Batman and that Bella would be the best part of a David Cronenberg movie. Sure, some line reads are wooden, but looking at the movie as two little Shinjis young people trying to reach out, they're selling it well.

And whether I like it or not, The Twilight Saga are still the biggest vampire movies of this current millennium. It meant a lot to a lot of people who were not me, and therefore it is bigger than me. What else has been this successful? There was no Summer of Morb, Dracula Untold did not lead us to a Dark Universe, and as much fun as What We Do in the Shadows was and is, it still pales in comparison. I would love to be on the vanguard of some Twilight reappraisals, those takes are definitely coming. But while I can apologize, I cannot really lead that charge.

If anybody wants to admit that Beautiful Creatures was a secret masterpiece, however, please call me.

Next Time: Well, sadly there won’t be one. I’ll see you next year for another Spooky Month, about something other than vampires. Will it be aliens? Zombies? Scooby-Doo? I have no idea. Enjoy your boring, non-spooky year to come.