Twilight: A Real Horror Movie

I don’t watch horror movies; I watch few suspense movies; thrillers?  Not at all.  I don’t like feeling frightened.  I don’t read scary books.  I had to forego my daily dose of the excellent Kate Shrewsday over Christmas, because she wrote a three-day ghost story.  The Muppet Christmas Carol is as ghostly as it gets for me.

So vampires…forget it!  The Hub, before he fully understood my need to live in a bubble of niceness, made me watch Scream and Interview With The Vampire.  Being clutched from behind in the middle of a deep sleep in the middle of the night by a terrified wife who woke up and hallucinated giant spiders and pretty vampires and knife-wielding masked men gave him so many near-heart attacks that he decided to stop my film-nasties education, and never resumed it.  Particularly after the night I jumped out of bed, screaming ‘Fire!  Fire!’, having watched The Towering Inferno at last, because ‘it is a classic’, and he realised he was living in a nightmare of his own making. 

Cover of Twilight (Two-Disc Special Edition)

 

The Hub likes the Twilight movies.  I bought him the trilogy box set for Christmas, to the amusement of our sons, who laughed at him for being a teenage girl and offered to buy him a Robert Pattinson poster for his wall.

The Hub made me watch the first one.  He assured me I would love it; it wasn’t frightening.  He promised.  He swore.  He was right.  It wasn’t frightening.  I did love it.  It was a romance between a lonely teenage girl and one of the undead.  What could be more natural?

Robert Pattinson was sexy in Twilight; I’ll admit.  It’s not pervy of me to think that because he was seventeen in 1918 which makes him 110 by my reckoning; and that makes him the perv, if you think about it: chasing after a teenage girl.

He was brooding and dark and all of those things women like in a fictional man.  Not so much fun when you have to live with it, I imagine.  Edward (RP) wants Bella (Kristen Stewart); he enters her room while she’s asleep, and watches her.  Just stands there and watches her.  He doesn’t sleep, you see; so that’s okay then.  He follows her, but that’s all right because if he didn’t follow her, he couldn’t save her from the nasty gang of young men who have horrid thoughts about her.  Better the devil you know, I suppose.

Bella is much safer with Edward, because he will protect her from the really mean undead who want to dine on her.  Too bad he’s the one who exposed her to them in the first place.  And it’s fine that he tells her he can’t promise never to kill her, because she trusts him, you see; she loves him.

I loved this film; I did.  I’m eager to watch the sequels.  The Hub was right: it was a romance; it wasn’t frightening.  In the conventional sense.

But sending out the message to impressionable young women that it’s okay to love a man who stalks you and who tells you he might kill you one day?  That’s a real horror story.

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Postscript

Creating Reciprocity left such a great quote in the comments, I have added it here:

Harry Potter is about confronting fears, finding inner strength and doing what is right in the face of adversity. Twilight is about how important it is to have a boyfriend. 

Stephen King