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An Aging Millennial Horror Nerd Watched The Twilight Saga and This Is What Happened

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I watched all of the Twilight movies in one weekend. I watched them because I wanted to write this article about all the weird choices that went into one of the most profitable franchises from the last 20 years. I wanted to understand why so many people felt invested in a bloodless, sexless supernatural love triangle. I did all the research, I dug into the old fan forums. I sifted through old promo videos, box office records, and interviews. I tried to make this article a listicle, I tried to make it meta, but nothing was ever right.

This franchise is undefinable.

Having watched all five movies, I can confidently say that the first movie is the best movie of the franchise. I did not like the first movie. I did not like how green it was, I did not like the way the camera framed everything at a dutch angle. I did not like how Edward the glittery vampire (Robert Pattinson) looked at Bella the high school student (Kristen Stewart). Is he farting? I thought, or is he cumming?? The special effects look incredibly cheap for a film based on an incredibly successful book series (in 2008, all three books were among the top 50-selling novels of the last 15 years). This was Summit Entertainment’s first foray into a big franchise production, and they were not confident that the Twilight fanbase would make them money. “This could just be 400 girls in Salt Lake City blogging about it,” said one executive, according to director Catherine Hardwicke. She told the Daily Beast, “they said, OK, Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants was a very popular book for girls, and it made $39 million. That’s it. We don’t know if this could ever make us any more than that, so we don’t really want to spend more than that.” Hardwicke made her movie for $37 million, and Twilight pulled in $69 (nice) million on opening weekend. Hardwicke was not invited back to direct the sequels.

The next four movies, which barely have a plot, continued to print money for Summit. New Moon made back its budget plus $22 million in profit in days, and Eclipse made even more – the $68 million movie broke even from Wednesday night ticket sales alone. The special effects continue to be mind-bogglingly bad. Sometimes the vampires have white faces, but their necks and ears have human skin tones. And I don’t like Jacob at all. I don’t like that the studio cast a white actor to play an indigenous character, and his abs never make up for his shitty attitude. Both Jacob and Edward are awful to Bella, in fact, everyone in this story is so patronizing and controlling. Where is the sexual tension? I keep thinking. Where is the romance?

Breaking Dawn Part 1 takes a wild turn in the final 20 minutes. There is actual violence and gore! There’s blood in this movie! Some characters justify some wild choices in very problematic ways (if you know, you know), and there is a baby with a nightmare CGI face. There’s an abstinence arc, an anti-abortion arc, and in Part 2, there’s a massive fight scene that doesn’t look half bad. Everything ends with Bella and Edward lying together in the sun, happily ever after (though they forgot to add the sparkling diamond skin effect).

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There is so much to hate about this franchise. The appropriation of indigenous culture, the anti-choice conservative messaging, and the abusive relationships that are branded as loving and romantic. The very bad special effects! Even the stigma of Twilight supposedly being for ‘silly’ teen girls couldn’t stop the Twi-hards tying their identities to these movies (“are you Team Edward or Team Jacob?”). When Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson started dating on the first movie set, their on-again, off-again relationship blurred fact and fiction, sending the fan base into a frenzy. In 2016, long after both actors had moved on, Stewart spoke candidly about that time in a profile for The New York Times Style Magazine. “People wanted me and Rob to be together so badly that our relationship was made into a product.”

Some fans continued to believe the two were a couple as late as 2020. I dipped my toe into the Robsten (Robert-Kristen) conspiracy blogs, where people believe the two are actually secretly married with multiple children. Any mention of Stewart’s subsequent female partners is dismissed as a misrepresentation of female friendship, and any woman who dares to date Pattison gets met with a barrage of online harassment. No one got it worse than singer F.K.A Twigs, who dated him in 2014. “Whatever I did at that time, people would find pictures of monkeys and have me doing the same things as the monkeys,” she told Louis Theroux on his Grounded podcast. She even started to view herself from their racist lens whenever she saw pictures of herself, thinking that she needed to “hide this monkey-ness that I have, because otherwise people are gonna come for me about it.” In one ‘popular’ Robsten blog, they go so far as to refer to Twigs as “IT.” I tried to understand the source of the nickname, but honestly, I had an easier time understanding Qanon lore, and I didn’t need any more brain damage.

The biggest problem with these movies that isn’t tied to the original books, is that they fail to embrace or celebrate the female gaze. Bella is intentionally bland and vague because she’s a stand-in for the reader, which is fine. It is an easy way for audiences to insert themselves into a romantic fantasy where two buff dudes fight for her affection. But the men who made these movies, aside from the first one, seem ashamed of its subject matter as if a story for girls holds any less value than a boy with a magic wand. There is no focus on eyes or touch, and the camera barely lingers on the male body, even though the werewolves all spend A LOT of time shirtless (no bare butts in sight, though). It’s all very safe, very PG, even though the men constantly talk about their ability and desire to harm Bella physically.

This is the paradox of Twilight. It’s a fantasy full of darkness that never quite manifests, safe for people who don’t think they can have a dark fantasy of their own. Vampires glitter in the sunlight, and werewolves never shed any blood – abuse isn’t actually abuse; it’s love. Twilight is the first half of Mulholland Drive before everything flips and the filth lurking behind the dumpster bursts to the surface. It’s a cheap Hollywood lie, selling bland passivity as desire and romance.

But none of these things matter, because no matter how ridiculous, harmful or cheap this franchise is, The Twilight Saga has made over 3.3 billion dollars since 2008. I don’t know what else to say.

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Editorials

What’s in a Look? The Jason Voorhees Redesign Controversy

The Jason Voorhees redesign sparked heated debate, but is the backlash overblown? Dive into Friday the 13th’s formula and fan expectations.

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If you’re a longtime reader of Horror Press, you may have noticed that I really really like the Friday the 13th franchise. Can’t get enough. And yet, I simply couldn’t muster a shred of enthusiasm for piling hate on the new Jason Voorhees redesign that Horror, Inc. recently shared with an unwitting public.

Why the Jason Voorhees Redesign Controversy Feels Overblown

Hockey mask? Check. Machete? Check. Clothing? Yeah, he’s wearing it. I really didn’t see the problem, but very many people online pointed out all the places where I should. The intensity and specificity of the critiques shot me right back to 2008, reminding me distinctly of watching Project Runway with my friend’s mom while I waited for him to get home from baseball practice. What, just me?

But the horror community’s sudden transformation into fashion mavens got me thinking about other things, too: the character of the franchise as a whole, how Jason Voorhees fits into it, and why I feel like this reaction has been blown out of proportion. (A disproportionate reaction to a pop culture thing? On my Internet? Well I never.)

Baghead Jason

What Does A Jason Look Like, Anyway?

What confused me the most about this reaction was something I couldn’t quite get a bead on. What does Jason Voorhees look like? His look, both masked and unmasked (especially unmasked), changes wildly from film to film, even when he’s played by the same person (in three consecutive movies, Kane Hodder played a hulking zombie Jason, a shiny slime monster Jason, and a Jason who was mainly seen in mirrors and looked like his face was stung by a thousand bees). And then there’s the matter of him being both a zombie child and a bagheaded killer before receiving his iconic hockey mask.

However, if you synthesize the various forms of the character into the archetypical Jason Voorhees, the one that most people might visualize in their head when told to imagine him, the result doesn’t not look like this new redesign. Frankly, I even think “redesign” is too strong a word for what this is. This image shows a dude in outdoorsy clothes wearing a hockey mask. It looks enough like “Jason Voorhees” to me that my eyes just slide right off of it.

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What Do We Expect From Friday the 13th, And What Do We Need?

Ultimately, many people clearly disagree with my assessment of this redesign, which led me to ponder the franchise as a whole. If there’s something to complain about with this new look, that implies that there is a “right” way and a “wrong” way to be a Friday the 13th movie.

This I can agree with. While the franchise is wide-ranging and expansive to the point that it has included Jason going to space, fighting a dream demon, and taking a cruise ship from a New Jersey lake to the New York harbor, the movies do still follow a reasonably consistent formula.

Step 1: Generate a group of people in a place either on the shores of Crystal Lake or in Crystal Lake township (they can travel elsewhere, but this is where they must start).
Step 2: Plunk Jason down near them, give him a variety of edged weapons, and watch what happens. One girl survives the onslaught, and sometimes she brings along a friend or two as adjunct survivors. Bada bing, bada boom, you have yourself a Friday the 13th movie.

If you fuck with that formula, you’ve got a problem. But beyond that, there’s really not a hell of a lot that the movies have in common. Sometimes you have a telekinetic final girl, other times you have a child psychologist. Sometimes the dead meat characters are camp counselors, but other times they’re partiers or townies or students attending space college.

Hell, even the people killing them aren’t always the same. Look at Pamela Voorhees in the original movie or Roy in A New Beginning.

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So why this protectiveness around the minutiae of Jason’s look?

It’s Us, Hi, We’re The Problem, It’s Us

I don’t mean to discount everyone’s negative opinions about this Jason redesign. There are a multitude of aesthetic and personal reasons to dislike what’s going on here, and you don’t have to turn that yuck into a yum just because I said so. But I think we’ve had online fandoms around long enough to see how poisonous they can be to the creative process.

For instance, was The Rise of Skywalker a better movie because it went down the laundry list of fan complaints about The Last Jedi and basically had characters stare into the camera and announce the ways they were being fixed?

Look, I’m not immune to having preconceived disdain for certain projects. If I’m waiting for a new installment in a franchise and all that I’m hearing coming out of producers’ mouths is “prequel” and “television show,” those are fighting words.

However, the constant online pushback to projects that are in early development might be one reason it has taken us so long to actually get more Friday the 13th (I’m talking in addition to the long delays amid the lawsuit, of course). It’s been more than a decade and a half without a new Jason vehicle, and that time keeps on stretching longer and longer.

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Poll taken from Horror Press Instagram account

What Fans Really Want From a New Jason Voorhees Movie

Instead of just letting the creative tap flow and having a filmmaker put out the thing they want to make, then having somebody else take the wheel and do that same thing for the next installment, it seems like producers are terrified of making the wrong move and angering the fans, which has prevented them from actually pulling the trigger on much of anything.

Look, we survived A New Beginning. And Jason Takes Manhattan. Even Jason Goes to Hell. A controversial misstep can’t kill the immortal beast that is Friday the 13th. I say let’s just let them make one. Having something tangible to complain about is better than having nothing at all.

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Editorials

Monstrous Mothers: Unveiling the Horror in ‘Mommie Dearest’ and ‘Umma’

The horror umbrella is massive and encompasses many subgenres including thrillers, sci-fi, and even true crime. I like to quip that movies like Mommie Dearest and Priscilla belong to the latter category. I even point out they have final girls surviving their monsters, but like most jokes, there is a lot of hard truth behind that. To be clear, Mommie Dearest is highly contested even by Christina Crawford, who wrote the book about the abuse suffered at the hands of her alcoholic guardian. However, the fact remains that there is an abusive mother terrorizing children at the heart of the horror. This is a tale as old as time in the genre, and we see these themes of motherhood, mental illness, and generational trauma often. So, why do we typically forget this movie when discussing titles like Psycho (1960), Run, Hereditary, etc.?

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I challenged myself to fill a gap in my cinema history this month and watched Mommie Dearest. I was very familiar with the movie due to how many drag queens reference it and because of Joan Crawford’s villainous reputation. However, I had never seen it in its entirety before, which is weird because I write about my own maternal baggage often. Without ever seeing the film, I knew this movie, categorized as a drama, belonged under my favorite genre label. Some sources even try to meet in the middle and classify it as a psychological drama, which is a phrase that does a lot of heavy lifting to remove itself from what it actually is. After all, what else should we call a film about being abused by the person who should love us most other than horror?

Does Mommie Dearest Belong in the Horror Genre?

The horror umbrella is massive and encompasses many subgenres including thrillers, sci-fi, and even true crime. I like to quip that movies like Mommie Dearest and Priscilla belong to the latter category. I even point out they have final girls surviving their monsters, but like most jokes, there is a lot of hard truth behind that. To be clear, Mommie Dearest is highly contested even by Christina Crawford, who wrote the book about the abuse suffered at the hands of her alcoholic guardian. However, the fact remains that there is an abusive mother terrorizing children at the heart of the horror. This is a tale as old as time in the genre, and we see these themes of motherhood, mental illness, and generational trauma often. So, why do we typically forget this movie when discussing titles like Psycho (1960), Run, Hereditary, etc.?

Mommie Dearest recounts a version of Christina Crawford’s upbringing by Hollywood royalty Joan Crawford. It depicts her as an unstable, jealous, manipulative woman who only holds space for her beliefs. As with most abusive parents, she takes out her frustrations and feelings of inadequacy on those around her. Specifically, those who cannot fight back due to the power dynamics at play. This version of Joan is a vicious bully, which feels familiar for many people who grew up with an abusive parent. How many of us never knew what would set our parental monster off, so just learned to walk on eggshells? How many of us grew up believing we were the problem for way longer than we should have? How many of us normalized the abuse for so long that it carried over into adulthood, letting us believe being mistreated is just part of living?

Watch the trailer for Mommie Dearest

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The Lasting Impact of Abusive Parents in Horror Movies

While my mother wasn’t the active bully in our home, part of my struggle with her is her complicitness in the hell she helped create for all of us. Which is why, while I don’t think Mommie Dearest is a great film, I believe it’s a decent horror flick. It made me want to revisit a better movie, Umma, that also dealt with motherhood, mental illness, and trauma. Iris K. Shim’s 2022 PG-13 horror sees Sandra Oh playing a single mother who has not healed. After growing up with her own mother, who was especially cruel to her, she has built her world around that trauma and forced her daughter to live within its walls with her. As someone who was severely homeschooled by a woman who still really needs to find a therapist, Umma hits me in my feelings every time. 

Watch the trailer for Umma below

Maternal Monsters: A Common Thread in Psycho, Hereditary, and More

Before the film starts, Oh’s character, Amanda, has turned her back on her family and cultural heritage. She has built a life that she’s not really living as she hides in her home, afraid of electricity due to the abuse she suffered at the hands of her mom. So, when her uncle shows up with her mother’s ashes, she is triggered and haunted. All of the issues she hasn’t dealt with rush to the surface, manifesting in ways that begin turning her into her deceased mom. Amanda does eventually force herself to confront her past to avoid becoming her mother and hurting her daughter. So, while Umma is different from Mommie Dearest, it’s not hard to see they share some of the same DNA. Scary moms make the genre go round which is why movies like M.O.M. Mothers of Monsters, Serial Mom, Mother, May I?, and so many others will always pull an audience by naming the monster in the title.

I doubt I am the first person on Norma Bates’ internet to clock that some of horror’s most notorious villains are parents, specifically moms. I’m also sure I cannot be the first person to argue Mommie Dearest is a horror movie on many levels. After all, a large part of the rabid fanbase seems to be comprised of genre kids who grew up wondering why the film felt familiar. However, I hope I am the first to encourage you to watch these two movies if your momma trauma will allow you to hold space for a couple more monstrous mothers this month. Both have much to say about how we cope with the fallout of being harmed by the people who should keep us safe.

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