Within the span of approximately five hours, I watched both Twilight and New Moon.

In this I reveal my confession, one I am aware is nigh unforgivable to some: I had never seen Twilight prior to this viewing. I had made an attempt a couple of months back, but roughly thirty minutes in I became so bored and angry with the film I turned it off. This, of course, does not excuse my transgressions, found in the numerous posts in which I heaped a healthy dose of vitriolic scorn upon Stephenie Meyer, her pathetic excuse for literature and the vile movies they spawned.

So I decided to watch both of them, the most recent installment whilst in the company of a pretty young lady. Twilight is, as was expected, a chore to get through. A half hour of the film could have easily been cut out, and I spent most of my time coming up with clever drinking game rules to make the torture more bearable (take a shot every time Kristen Stewart shows anything that resembles emotion). To spare you another negative review, it is, in short, a HORRIBLE movie in every sense of the word. This brings us to New Moon.

First, a minor digression-cum-segue. Do you remember the acting of the children in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone? It was, to be blunt, awful. This is due primarily to the fact that the main child actors were inexperienced, yet we were lucky enough to have this offset by the exceptionally talented acting of Alan Rickman, Maggie Smith, et al. With each subsequent movie, their skills improved, with said improvement being visible in the second film.

The same cannot be said for New Moon. Kristen Stewart is a block of wood. She is incapable of showing anything other than mild bewilderment to every situation, be it running into an old friend or being confronted with four werewolves ready to eat your face. Robert Pattinson is no better and manages to bring his special brand of brooding angst to the table. Taylor Lautner was decent, and certainly a better actor than Stewart or Pattinson, though that really isn’t saying much. The best actress was Ashley Greene, who played Edward’s sister Alice, but I may have been blind to her horrible acting because she’s just too fucking adorable. Beyond this, the plot was the mirror image of the first film, with werewolves taking the place of vampires and only a minor shift and an increase in action toward the end. Like the first film, it was entirely too long, plagued by ridiculous voice overs, horribly placed music and so much brooding angst I felt like I was back in high school. The whole thing was an embarrassment of film-making, and it should be wiped off the face of the earth.

But. Yes, but.

I can see why it’s so popular. In between chattering teeth due to the extreme cold front that fell upon Denver and copious amounts of laughter, my movie-going compatriot expressed to me how much she loved the film, despite her admittance that it was indeed a bad movie. When I asked her why, she responded with:

“What girl doesn’t want to be fought over by a sexy werewolf and vampire?”

To this I said,

“So it simply satisfies the 14-year old girl living inside every adult female?”

She thus confirmed my suspicions: the Twilight saga is nothing more than a 14-year old girls wet dream. With this realization (which is clearly not a new concept, but one I feel is overlooked by detractors), most problems that are often associated with the Twilight films can be summarily dismissed as the pompous bloviation of horror fans who fail to realize that the series is simply not made for them. Taking this into account, is it really that big of a deal that Meyer raped vampire lore by making her vampires sparkle in the daylight instead of dying?

If you’re a horror fan and you want to rip apart Twilight, do so because it’s just a bad movie, not because of anything you might perceive as an affront to vampires. It’s become a big deal within the horror community precisely because of this.

This is the problem with Twilight. In the end, all it does it feeds the flames, preventing it from fading into relative obscurity. If you’re going to hate Twilight, do so because it’s just a bad movie, and leave it at that.

As for the books, well, that’s a different story entirely. I’m also aware this might come off as slightly hypocritical, but opinions can change. For example, I used to hate all remakes. Now I hate all but one (Last House on the Left).