It's Anti-Twilight Week!

With the release of New Moon this Friday, I thought this would be a great time for an anti-Twilight week. I’d like to do something a little different though. Rather than spend the week trashing the books or movies, I’d like to spotlight other works that focus on vampires in print and on film. They’ll be some obvious choices here, but hopefully we can expose readers to some works they’ve never heard of before.


Okay, a couple digs at Twilight. First, they’re unbelievably poorly written. Stephanie Meyer has never met an adverb she wasn’t completely in love with. Her prose takes on the breathless hyperactive musings of a junior high school girl babbling in her diary after a first date. She has admitted she did absolutely no research in to vampire mythos, and just made things up as she saw fit. The resulting characters are pretty disastrous. In her heroine Bella, Meyers has created an anti-Buffy. Instead of a strong, vocal female presence, the Twilight series centers on a decidedly average, mopey, young woman that seems perfectly content to let events unfold around her rather than ever taking control. Aside from being unable to grasp the fundamental concepts of what makes up a vampire, Meyers also has no idea how to write action. Whenever something remotely exciting seems about to happen, whether it’s a vampire/werewolf throw down or good vs. evil vamps, Meyers always finds a way to write Bella as conveniently knocked out or stuck in a tree for her own safekeeping, providing for complete action-free climaxes.

Ok, one dig at this Robert Pattison guy. I’m sure he’s a nice guy, and the fact that he’s been on the cover of every tabloid for two years without a story coming out that he’s snapped and is stuffing his escalade trunk with dead hookers is a positive. However, I don’t get the obsession nearly every female aged 13 to 50 seem to have with this dude. He has an odd shaped head, the bushiest eyebrows outside of a Jim Henson creation I’ve ever seen and he constantly wears a look on his face that makes it clear he has a difficult time grasping simple concepts? This is what passes as sexy in 2009?

Enough ranting for one night. We’ll have our first couple selections up tomorrow evening, so be sure to check back in. And if you have your own favorite movies or books you think we’re ignoring, let us know, we’ll be more than happy to get some guest columnists give us their lists.