Twilight film review

Twilight film review

“When you can live forever, what do you live for?” With fans going to see Twilight in droves, non-fans wondering what all the fuss is about, and the media delighted to spend column inches worrying about the perceived abstinence-pushing in the book, our intrepid reporter watches ‘Twilight’ on the big screen. Yes, but is it art?

Most of us have heard of Twilight, the book-turned-film that everyone is touting as the next Harry Potter. We might have heard of it through children who have read the book and ‘fallen in love with it’, or through elder teenagers seething because it puts the vampire genre to shame. We all know what it’s about; vampires. Plain and simple, right? Wrong. The story is more a romance than a nod to the vampire genre, and with the recent adaption of the film in cinemas in the United Kingdom on December the 19th, people just can’t stop talking about it – mostly because the media are wailing and gnashing their teeth about the perceived pro-abstinence approach to teenage sexuality in Twilight.

Vampire films have been a part of our culture since before the talkies (the first vampire movie ever was the 1922 silent classic by Murnau, ‘Nosferatu’). Vampire literature has been around longer than that. The first vampire appeared in eighteenth century poetry, and the first vampire publication was Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819), which was inspired by the life and legend of Lord Byron. Vampires may be able to live for hundreds of years but their fiction has been around for equally long and as a result we all know the basics: They can’t go out into the sunlight, garlic is their enemy, a stake through the heart sorts them out…

Because we’re so familiar with the vampire ethos, the fictional works of the last few decades have really played about with the elements of the genre to explore the concept of the vampire and bring something fresh, steaming and dripping with blood to the table. Modern vampires have been updated, for example, in