Movies
Stephenie Meyer Talks How ‘Twilight’ Almost Didn’t Happen
The popularity of the Twilight books is a complete mystery to it’s author, Stephenie Meyer. She originally wrote it for herself, a 29-year-old mother of three, but it’s no mystery to the hundreds of thousands of fans. The popularity of the book series is so huge that even we were compelled to cover the film here at Bloody Disgusting. While we know it’s not a straight up horror film, it does have vampires, and some bloodletting. TWILIGHT may be a nice gateway for a younger generation of horror fans, something dark to pique people’s interests. With that, we went to the press junket for the film TWILIGHT, which opens in theaters this Friday, November 21st. Meyer was her usual charming self, re-answering questions that hundreds of fan websites have covered.
A few years back Meyer sold the rights for the movie to a different company, she realized that they we not going to do the book justice, and almost didn’t renew the rights to anyone.
“It was a horrifying experience, I had realized that it could go wrong, and that it could be done badly, that they would do something that had nothing to do with the [original] story, that was shocking to me.”
The book and film are about a high school girl named Bella falls in love with a vampire. The new couple leads a rival vampire clan to pursue them and attempt to force her to decide if she, too, wishes to become one of the undead.
When Summit wanted the rights, Meyer was wary but agreed after getting it in writing that they had to stick to the fundamental elements of the story.
“Tthe vampires have to have the same basic rules as the vampire world I’ve created, which means no fangs, no costumes, they have to sparkle in the sunlight, the characters have to exist by their present names and you can’t kill anyone that doesn’t die in the book.”
When she was finally able to screen the final product she explains, “So many scenes looked the way I had envisioned them, it was partially creepy and partially wonderful. … I think the acting in this movie is something special.”
An interesting note was about how much involvement she had with the screenplay. The filmmakers and the company behind the film at Summit asked for her input on the script, they incorporated about 90% of her notes.
“One thing I insisted on keeping true to the book is “the lion and lamb” line,” Meyer tells us at the junket where she revealed even more. “I actually think that the way Melissa [Rossenburg] wrote it sounded better for the movie, it was just a little more relaxed, but the problem is that that line is actually tattooed on people’s bodies, which I don’t approve of by the way…“She continues, “If you take that line and change it, that’s a potential backlash situation.”
The Fans in this case were certainly helping Meyer in her decision-making, but what is it about vampires that so many people are connecting with? Meyer explains her theory.
“I am not a vampire fan, and never have been. I don’t do horror, I’m an enormous scaredy cat, Hitchcock is about as much as I can handle, and I love it, but anything more then that and you’re not going to see me in the theater. It’s widely out of character for me to write about them [vampires].
“Besides myself, it seems that everybody really loves to be scared, in a controlled environment, horror movies do really well, it’s a big industry, people read a lot of scary books, I’m just missing that gene.“
It’s been eight years since Ari Aster came onto the scene and helped usher in a new wave of horror with Hereditary, one of the rare horror movies from the past ten years that still seems to come up in conversation every single week. And it’s back in the conversation this week, with Ari Aster revealing at an event that he’s already written a prequel to Hereditary!
Ari Aster was on hand at the American Cinematheque for Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair last week, a Los Angeles festival that screened all of Aster’s movies to date. The website Gold Derby reports that Aster revealed the Hereditary prequel script during a Q&A at the event, and you can watch the full Q&A conversation below for confirmation on the website’s report.
“I wrote a prequel to this,” Aster told the crowd, referring to Hereditary. “It never feels like the right time to do it. It’s a prequel, not a sequel so I don’t know where this goes.”
Would a potential Hereditary prequel dig deeper into the mythology of demon king Paimon? Unfortunately, Aster provides no further details on his prequel approach at this time.
Aster said of Hereditary during the same Q&A, “I was just trying to make a really good horror movie.” I think most horror fans would agree that he more than accomplished that goal, and the past eight years have proven that Hereditary is an enduring classic of its generation.
We celebrated the fifth anniversary of Hereditary here on BD back in 2023.
Ron Breton wrote, “Hereditary offers a similar emotional resonance to this new generation of horror – my generation of horror– as movie-goers in the seventies when they first saw Exorcist. Much like Aster’s film, we see the incomprehensible evil wear the face of a young girl; the victim of a raw deal she had no say in, as it tears a family to its core. Sure, both films offer so many terrifying visuals that can make the hair stand up on anyone’s neck – but it also depicts intense relationships and emotions that are tangible. Real. Familiar.”
“In that familiarity lies the uncanny, ready to rear its ugly head and force us to confront thoughts and horrors laying dormant and clawing at our psyche,” Breton continued his 5th anniversary celebration of Hereditary. “And it doesn’t matter if it’s been five or fifty years. These horrors are always there, as we become pawns in its horrible, hopeless machine.”
Toni Collette, Gabriel Byrne, Alex Wolff, Ann Dowd, and Milly Shapiro star in Hereditary. In the film, “A grieving family is haunted by tragic and disturbing occurrences.”
That’s putting it mildly, eh?!
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