interdisciplinary approaches to twilight
would expect it to be represented as a ‘cold-blooded’ murder in the film. Clearly, however, the filmmakers were more concerned with preserving Edward’s human and attractive image, and so in the film Edward kills Victoria with a swift bite to the neck, and she falls into pieces like a beautiful stone statue, distancing the scene from traditional horror imagery.
The narrative of Twilight Categorizing the Twilight books and films as horror narratives poses several problems. One concerns the plot, for it does not follow the ‘seek and destroy’ pattern, or does so only partially. The first book, Twilight, only applies the traditional horror narrative in the last quarter of the book, when James is presented as a potential threat and has to be killed. His character bears the traditional features of vampires: he is extraordinarily fast and strong, his senses are highly developed, but what makes him a monster is his thirst for blood and his cruelty. He is the monster who transgresses the bounds of normal, everyday life and of the inhuman and bestial – so he has to be eliminated. The second book and film, New Moon, is not a horror story if we consider the construction of the narrative. For the most part, the book concentrates on the love triangle, while the last hundred pages, devoted to Edward’s rescue, is more an action drama with a typical deadline narrative. We witness a transgression, but it is Bella who enters the world of the unknown and prohibited that is threatening her life, and the ‘seek and destroy’ pattern is missing. Although Victoria returns in New Moon and the hunt for her begins, her appearances only form the beginning of the plot that will evolve in Eclipse. Eclipse returns to the traditional horror narrative; in fact, it is the volume which employs the horror paradigm to the greatest extent, as the threat – introduced by the attacks in Seattle and the intrusion of the unknown vampire into Bella’s flat – grows continuously and only disappears when Victoria and her ‘army’ are liquidated. Nevertheless, apart from the length of the horror narrative, there is another difference between the first and the third volumes. The 254