“I don’t have the strength to stay away from you any more,” says Edward Cullen to Bella Swan in the first Twilight movie. “You’re like my own personal brand of heroin.”
Thus began the unforeseen addiction of millions of human teenagers to the five-film vampire saga, which took $3.3bn (£2.56bn) worldwide, became a cultural phenomenon, and altered the future of female-led cinema for ever.
Ten years ago this month, when Twilight premiered, no one was sure whether the success of Stephenie Meyer’s young adult novels would transfer to the screen. The saturnine lead actors – lip-biting human Kristen Stewart and neck-biting vampire Robert Pattinson – were almost unknown. Director Catherine Hardwicke had a 44-day shoot and a scrimp-and-see $37m budget compared with the going rate of $200m for such CGI-fantasy-action movies.
At first glance, the story seemed ridiculous: Dracula for ditzes. Stroppy 17-year-old Bella arrives in the town of Forks in the Pacific Northwest to stay with her divorced father. At school she meets the pale, distinguished, distant Edward, who is poleaxed by bloodlust for her. (There’s a hilarious scene in which Bella sniffs her own armpit in the school lab, because her science partner Edward seems so repelled. Of course, he’s just trying to control his vampiric hunger.) Edward keeps saving Bella with his supernatural powers and they fall in love, but he must hold back in case cuddles turn to canapés. Plus, their love match is opposed by local werewolves, vampires and parents. What can possibly go wrong?
Many critics excoriated the tweenie trash (Roger Ebert described it as a “tepid achievement”) and its supposed sexual-abstinence message got a drubbing from feminists – more on that later.
But the two young leads had almost nuclear chemistry, and young women identified with Bella’s determination to choose her own fate – as well as her realistic Seattle-grunge clothing choices. To his credit, this paper’s reviewer Peter Bradshaw ponied up four stars and asked the question: “Which of us, in our impressionable teenage years, has not displaced an irrational horror of sex into a freaky emo crush on a moody vampire with sky-high cheekbones and a taste for human blood?”
On Twilight’s opening weekend in the United States, it turned out that the emo-crush was bordering on mass hysteria. The film made $69m by Sunday. The fans, known as Twi-hards, were on a roll. A five-film franchise was launched – Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse, Breaking Dawn I and II – and the rest is haemoglobin-soaked history.
“The part that shocked Hollywood was that the film’s stunning success was fuelled by ‘girl power,’” says Melissa Silverstein of Women and Hollywood. “The general consensus in Hollywood is that films and books made for men and boys are seen as ‘universal’, and things that are made for women and girls are somehow seen as ‘other.’ Women are seen as a ‘niche’ audience. This ‘nichification’ of women has been one of the most enduring problems facing the much-maligned chick flick.”
The sensation of Twilight in 2008 caused Hollywood studios to perk up and pay attention to a new ticket-buying demographic – young women (and, let’s be honest, their vampire-struck mums). For years, the superhero and adventure franchises had faithfully served the 12- to 25-year-old male audience, without taking the economic power of the handbag into account.
The race to satiate the imaginations of teenage girls was on. In 2012, Jennifer Lawrence premiered in the first of four box-office-busting Hunger Games movies; in 2014, Shailene Woodley appeared in the first of three dystopian Divergent films. Meanwhile, at the younger end of the market, Disney’s Brave in 2013 and Frozen that same year gave the traditional princess narrative a good kicking.
But The Hunger Games and Divergent were all directed by men. It was not until Patty Jenkins took on Wonder Woman that a female-directed film outsold Twilight. Only now, after 20 male-directed blockbusters in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, will the 21st, Captain Marvel, be directed by a woman. At the Comic Con preview in New York last month, which pre-Twilight was home only to fanboys and rare fangirls, Hardwicke spoke about her film’s long-term effect: “Twilight changed the perception, the idea that a movie about a girl wouldn’t be popular, wouldn’t make a lot of money. It blew it out of the water. A novel written by a woman, a movie directed by a female. We broke records. People can use that for ammo – when another female director goes to a meeting, they are gonna say, ‘Well, I don’t think you can do this,’ and they can respond with, ‘Well, Catherine did it, Twilight did it.’ You use it as a building block to the next thing and the next thing.”
Hardwicke, who made the indies Thirteen and Lords of Dogtown, fought for her version of Twilight, written by Melissa Rosenberg, which stayed close to Meyer’s book. A previous version had Bella escaping the FBI on a jet ski, which somewhat destroyed the moody, mossy, forested vibe of the ancient vampire cult. Yet the director’s guiding hand and production design skill was not properly valued by the franchise. When Hardwicke was told to make the second film New Moon in less than a year, to a tight budget, she baulked.
The studio, Summit Entertainment, then asked Chris Weitz to step in. He was director of The Golden Compass, a franchise that failed to take off. No matter. New Moon and the rest of the often-shoddy Twilight films were directed by men: David Slade and Bill Condon. Hardwicke went on to make Red Riding Hood and has just finished an English-language remake of Miss Bala.
Hardwicke and her casting director also deserve credit for spotting the nascent star-power in Stewart and Pattinson, who have used their fame to greenlight many an art-house movie, regularly appearing on the red carpet at Cannes. Pattinson made Cosmopolis with David Cronenberg and Good Time with the Safdie brothers; Stewart made Clouds of Sils Maria and Personal Shopper with Olivier Assayas.
Stewart had previously played Jodie Foster’s daughter in Panic Room and appeared in Into the Wild, while Pattinson’s main credit was playing Cedric Diggory in the Harry Potter franchise. Hardwicke ran chemistry tests between Stewart and four potential co-stars. “It was like blind-date central,” she said. Then they clicked.
At certain points, Pattinson and Stewart were lovers on screen and off, which perhaps added to the veracity. Certainly, young women were happy to wait through three-and-a-half films before the relationship was consummated in a bed-breaking honeymoon scene after a glitzy wedding in Breaking Dawn I. For many fans, the films were not about abstinence, but everlasting foreplay.
Looked at through the lens of the #MeToo generation, there is something to be said for a boy who is not pressuring a teenage girl to have sex. (Although it’s worth remembering that although Edward looks 17, he is, in fact, 109 in vampire years. Let’s not go there.)
But many feminists just said no to Twilight and claimed the vampire was merely a metaphor for the dangers of pre-marital sexual intercourse. Silverstein also points out that “women were angered by Edward’s overprotection and Bella’s acquiescence. Where is her independent streak with Edward that she displays so fervently with her father and friends? Let’s also not forget that Edward watches (some sites have used the word stalk) Bella sleep in her bedroom.”
In Bitch magazine, Professor Christine Seifert labelled the saga “abstinence porn” and added: “Twilight actually convinces us that self-denial is hot. Fan reaction suggests that in the beginning, Edward and Bella’s chaste but sexually charged relationship was steamy precisely because it was unconsummated.”
Of course, the later films became all about who would be the best and most self-sacrificial protector of Bella – Edward or the werewolf Jacob Black played by the increasingly muscled Taylor Lautner. Publicity fanned the flames of Team Edward v Team Jacob, while Bella was buffeted between the two.
But Bella always had a streak of determination, and the strange power of being able to close her mind to Edward’s thought-reading. In Breaking Dawn I, she courageously handles the gruesome problems of giving birth to a hybrid human-vampire baby, but by Breaking Dawn II, she takes on vampire shape herself, and arm-wrestles the rest of the Cullen coven into submission, just after she has chased a mountain lion and sunk her teeth into its jugular. In the end, Bella is active and empowered, a leader in battle, and the Twi-hards loved it.
Hardwicke quietly slipped some of her own politics into the first film, too, particularly when it came to casting a few actors or colour, who were not in the books, which depicted all vampires with pale, white, glittering skin. (The werewolves of the Quileute Tribe were mostly Native American.) Hardwicke tried to encourage Meyer to cast Alice Cullen as Japanese, to no avail, but she did persuade the author that there could be some diversity among the school pupils and that Kenyan-American actor Edi Gathegi would play the vampire Laurent.
Writing this feature brought back fond and ridiculous memories of watching the whole saga unfold as a critic, and taking my daughter, who was 10 when the first film debuted, and my son, then 13, through screaming, palpitating fans in Leicester Square to later premieres. I remember once being so deep in a sea of hormonal R-Patz-aroused girls that I got lost and had to aim for Mark Kermode’s quiff bobbing above the crowd to reach the cinema entrance. (Kermode always understood the popular Twilight phenomenon, while others sneered.)
This week, I speed-watched all five Twilight films on Netflix one evening. My son came by and noted that he had read all the books, and that the vampire wars were a precursor to his fondness for Game of Thrones, so there was a male demographic in the audience, somewhere. My daughter sent me the parodic “Edward and Bella – a bad lip reading of Twilight”, which I thoroughly recommend. It has 39 million views on YouTube.
A second viewing of the films reveals that R-Patz and K-Stew are as electric as ever in this, the world’s longest staring-and-kissing sequence. But some of the other elements are totally weird.
There’s Michael Sheen just chewing the scenery as Aro the mind-reading Volturi vampire – or is it Tony Blair? There’s the disturbing business of Jacob the werewolf “imprinting” on Renesmee the vampire-human baby and planning to become her lover when she is fully grown. There’s the sippy cup of blood with a straw when Bella gets those pregnancy cravings. There’s the eternal youth and immortality bestowed by vampirism, so why do all the actors look like they have been Botoxed and lathered in clown paint? Worse still, there’s a hidden anti-vegan message when Edward explains to Bella that his family are “vegetarian vampires” and only drink the blood of animals. “It’s like a human on tofu – keeps you strong but never satisfied.” Finally, it’s worth remembering that Fifty Shades of Grey began as Twilight fan fiction.
Yet, overall, I think Twilight’s legacy is a positive one, for young readers, for Twi-hard cinephiles, for the future of female-led and directed blockbusters. I’ll leave the last word to K-Stew in Interview magazine: “Anybody who wants to talk shit about Twilight, I completely get it. But there’s something there that I’m endlessly, and to this day, fucking proud of. My memory of it felt – still feels – really good.”
