Hannah covers horror, sci-fi, and games at Collider, where she writes news and features, reviews new releases, and interviews the people who make them. She’s helping build out Collider’s gaming coverage, with Pokémon as one of her specialties. If she isn’t writing about a monster, she’s probably watching one on a tape from her VHS collection.
Nearly 18 years after Kristen Stewart first arrived in Forks as Bella Swan, Twilight still has an audience willing to follow her into the woods. Catherine Hardwicke’s adaptation of Stephenie Meyer’s novel introduced Stewart’s Bella Swan to Robert Pattinson’s Edward Cullen, setting up a romance that would carry five movies. The sequels expanded their supernatural world, but the first movie remains a particularly atmospheric watch for October.
There is something especially fitting about revisiting its rain-soaked setting as Halloween approaches. Edward’s attempts to resist Bella’s blood give their courtship an underlying threat long before another vampire makes her their target. Even with its familiar dialogue and much-discussed baseball sequence, the movie finds room for genuine menace, particularly when Bella encounters someone with no interest in protecting her.
Four of the largest communities on the planet, and four completely different reasons to belong to one. Here is yours, what it would give you, and the argument you would be having within a week.
You belong to the fandom that is really about comfort. Hogwarts works on people because it is a place rather than a plot, and the pull is not the wizard war so much as the corridors, the food, the weather and the sense that somebody is expecting you.
You belong to the deepest fandom on this list, the one where somebody has always read further than you and is quietly delighted to say so. Middle-earth rewards patience more than any other world in popular culture.
You belong to the loudest and largest tent of the four, the one where three generations are all watching the same thing and none of them agree about any of it. That disagreement is not a flaw in this fandom, it is the main activity.
You belong to the thinking fandom, the one that turns up for the argument rather than the explosion. Trek has always been a series of ethical problems in space, and the people who love it love being asked what they would have done.
The original movie's appeal owes plenty to Hardwicke’s approach to the material. Her version of Forks feels damp and isolated, making Bella’s fascination with the Cullen family easier to understand. Stewart and Pattinson give their scenes an awkward intensity that suits two people struggling to make sense of an attraction neither can comfortably explain. It also helps that the first movie keeps its central danger personal. Before the saga moves into larger conflicts between vampire factions, Bella is a teenager discovering that the person she wants to be closest to could kill her. The confrontation with James gives that fear a physical form, bringing the romance into a more direct survival story.
Twilight and its four sequels are streaming on Netflix in the United States.
