This year marks the 20th anniversary of Stephenie Meyer’s novel, Twilight. The book series of the same name has sold over 160 million copies, been translated into 38 languages and adapted into five blockbuster films.
Vampires are perennially popular, largely because we make and remake them to help us address our social concerns and fears. As author Nina Auerbach argues in her 1995 book Our Vampires, Ourselves: “We make the vampires we need for the times we live in.”
The vampires of Twilight captured the spirit of 2005. Fantasy fiction and film with a central struggle between good and evil abounded: think Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings. The melancholy of Twilight’s characters also chimed with chart-topping emo music (which formed some of the soundtrack for the film adaptations).
