How Twilight Killed Vampire Movies (& How Streaming Saved Them)

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While the perennially popular vampire sub-genre never stays dead for too long, the Twilight saga did kill the horror trope for some time before Netflix managed to bring them back. The Twilight movies were massively successful adaptations of author Stephenie Meyer’s bestselling young adult novel saga. Telling the tale of small-town teen Bella Swan and her vampire love interest Edward Cullen, the Twilight movies got a lot of flack from critics for their earnest tone but were largely beloved by fans of the source material.

This is likely because, unlike Twilight’s original script draft and its “badass Bella,” the movie adaptations stuck to the source novels. For the most part, the Twilight movies were extremely faithful to the novels they were adapted from. However, this meant that the Twilight series essentially reinvented popular vampire mythology (as the novels had done), and made the bloodsuckers a lot less easy to take seriously in the process.

Related: Twilight: Marcus’s Dark Backstory Explained

Since the first time Count Dracula appeared on-screen, cinematic vampires had historically been seen as an unusual intersection between the romantic and the macabre. Many movie vampires were savage, blood-lusting monsters at night but charismatic charmers by day who could mesmerize their victims before opening their arteries. Although the Twilight movies added violence to the source stories, the adaptations nonetheless massively softened the cultural image of vampires. Twilight’s heroic bloodsuckers were moody teens, “vegetarian” nomads who lived off animal blood and were infamously easy to spot because their skin sparkled in the sun. This characterization made them perfect fodder for a teen romance saga but meant that, at the