For all Buffy’s efforts, vampires have been sinking their teeth ever deeper into Generation W’s pop culture. To a spate of hugely profitable books and HBO’s True Blood, add this month’s Twilight, a movie based on Stephenie Meyer’s blockbuster saga, which has sold millions of copies in the U.S. alone. As starlet Kristen Stewart plays the mortal innocent to Robert Pattinson’s undead rebel, the author explores the buried messages of this bloodsucking invasion.

It’s as if Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s valiant afterschool activities went for naught. For seven seasons (1997–2003), Sarah Michelle Gellar’s girl-power prodigy “Buffy Summers” stalked and staked nearly every bulbous head with bared incisors menacing the graveyard mists and nightclub shadows of Sunnydale, a mission climaxing in the series finale with an Armageddon showdown where the outnumbered forces of light faced off against the pale legions of darkness and emerged torn and scraped, but victorious. Yet here we are, only a few years after Buffy retired her pointy stick, up to our glazed eyeballs with the children of Dracula. Perhaps this fresh profusion of vampires is representative of a pop culture that is sucking itself dry—draining the last drops out of a pulp genre, having exhausted its creative resources—or perhaps it testifies to the procreative power of gothic sensibility to regenerate fear and eros and reclaim the night. A batch of vampire serials are running concurrently in the publishing world, such as the Buffy novelizations, Vampire Academy, The Morganville Vampires, Vampire Kisses, The Vampire Diaries, Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter, and Charlaine Harris’s “Southern Vampire Mysteries,” the last being the sultry inspiration for the new HBO series True Blood, adapted by Alan Ball (whose previous HBO show, Six Feet Under, established his bona fides in the queasy-mortality department). But the undisputed golden calf of the vampire cotillion is Stephenie Meyer’s “The Twilight Saga,” a blockbuster bloodsucker series that has helped fill the yearning void left by the boarding up of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter wizard shop. Commercially, “The Twilight Saga” has given book publishing a blood transfusion, with sales topping seven million copies worldwide; it’s also a global sensation, translated into 20 languages. The physical properties of the books themselves may explain their popularity. They’re thick, chunky, promising a fat read—you don’t so much curl up with them as gulp them down.

Where True Blood is steamed in the sweat, mildew, and cheap swill of its neon-pit-stop, honky-tonk Louisiana locale (everyone except Anna Paquin’s Buffy-esque heroine and her black B.F.F. looks a little lank), “The Twilight Saga” shivers under the cloud canopy of rainy northwest Washington State, where the gray-green light and damp haze make it hard to tell the people from the mushrooms. A teenage “adult child” of divorce, Isabella Swan—everybody calls her Bella—migrates from the glassy sprawl of Phoenix, Arizona, to move in with her father, a police chief who watches a lot of sports on TV in lieu of having a personality. On her first day at a new high school, always an awkward initiation rite, Bella discovers an ethereal clique occupying a corner table in the cafeteria, ready for their photo shoot. “[Their] faces, so different, so similar, were all devastatingly, inhumanly beautiful. They were faces you never expected to see except perhaps on the airbrushed pages of a fashion magazine.” Perhaps the most beautiful, fashion-modelly of the lunch bunch is Edward, Bella’s future and forever vampire lover, a high-cheekboned cross between Rudolf Nureyev and Chris Isaak in their princely prime, whose irises change color according to his moody moods (“Anger flashed in his tawny eyes”). Presumably flossing after every forest kill (ecologically correct, Edward feeds in the wild only on four-legged predators not on the endangered-species list), this immortal vial of pure mystique is a dental hygienist’s delight: “He smiled widely, flashing a set of perfect, ultrawhite teeth.” Which complement his perfect, ultra-white skin, Edward’s immaculate physique resembling an ice statue carved out of frozen milk by Michelangelo and irradiated with moonlight, putting nature itself in the shade: “The meadow, so spectacular to me at first, paled next to his magnificence.” Edward offers more than splendor in the grass. An ace driver and aerial gymnast, he also excels as a composer and pianist, emo’s answer to Chopin. “And then his fingers flowed swiftly across the ivory, and the room was filled with a composition so complex, so luxuriant, it was impossible to believe only one set of hands played.” No portrait in fine-fingered elegance (“Finished with the last bite of lasagna, I lifted a glass and chugged the remains of my milk”), Bella rues the disparity between his spectral aura and her clay form. “He looked like a god. I looked very average, even for a human, almost shamefully plain.” Yet Edward is captivated by Bella’s heavenly scent (“You smell so good in the rain”) and craves her company (“I crave your company”), his “cold, marble lips” intended only for her hot little pucker.

Compared with the pop medievalism of the Buffyverse, the secret order of occult society in Anne Rice’s Lestat series, and the evolving sexual mores of Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter (are werewolves suitable bedmates?), Meyer’s “Twilight Saga” is light on bloodsucking lore, heavy on high-school humdrum. “My fourth hour class got out late, and the lunch table I always sat at was full by the time I arrived. Mike was there, Jessica and Angela, Conner, Tyler, Eric and Lauren. Katie Marshall, the redheaded junior who lived around the corner from me, was sitting with Eric, and Austin Marks—older brother to the boy with the motorcycles—was next to her.” Glad we got those seating arrangements sorted out! Vampires aside, “The Twilight Saga” is primarily young-adult fiction for unjaded palates, another rendition of the classic courtship tale about a modest duckling (with strength of character that sets her apart from the shallow and silly) who falls under the spell of a black swan of a man and, after much sparring, melts his Rochester/Mr. Darcy reserve. Here it is not a haughty man with the secret hurt that makes him vulnerable and attainable, but a beautiful boy at the peak of his slender translucence, which gives “The Twilight Saga” a gay crossover appeal. Everything a girl could want in one dreamy envelope, Edward is the answer to a princess’s prayers—doting, fiercely protective, carrying his beloved great distances in his arms like a groom forever crossing the honeymoon threshold. In the novels it gets monotonous having Bella sigh over how breathtaking Edward is every time he materializes, subjecting the reader to dumb-bunny clunkers such as this beaut: “Edward stood in the halo of the porch light, looking like a male model in an advertisement for raincoats.”

Happily, the forthcoming film of Twilight (based on a sample tasting) sweeps away the trite chatter of Bella’s interior monologue and the clumpy pace of Meyer’s storytelling with one swoop of the camera across the mist-wreathed pine forests of the Pacific Northwest, the forsaken terrain of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. The de-saturated colors create an instant emotional climate of hooded intentions, muffled instincts. Directed by Catherine Hardwicke, whose Thirteen displayed an intimate feel for the loose-limbed, tense-nerved clamor of teenage hormones, Twilight is engulfed in sidelong looks and tentative touches, leaving the rough sex and parody of identity politics to True Blood (where vampires “come out of the coffin” to demand citizenship rights) and going for the full unabashed primal romanticism of first love. Watching the footage made me feel like a 14-year-old girl again. Let me rephrase that. Oh, forget it. Despite the predictable squalling on some of the Twilight fanblogs, the two leads are impeccably cast. Kristen Stewart, who excelled in Sean Penn’s Into the Wild, is quietly pretty and believably guarded-yet-intrigued, more sympathetic and relatable-to than the spoiled vamps of The Hills and Gossip Girl. And she has that Mary-Louise Parker tipped-upper-lip thing going, which is never harmful.

If Kristen Stewart is a perfect fit for Bella, the film’s Edward makes for a vaulting improvement over the novels’. In “The Twilight Saga,” Edward is a superior entity given to frequent snickering (“He snickered, shaking his head”) and chuckling (“‘Kryptonite doesn’t bother me, either,’ he chuckled”). And who wants a snickering, chuckling vampire, no matter how poetically he drinks in the music of Debussy? A controversial casting choice, Robert Pattinson, familiar from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, should rout the doubters with his performance and presence, investing Edward with a troubled hesitancy and a sly, deflective humor that suggest a post-Method actor without the mumbles. When Pattinson’s Edward emerges in the school parking lot, wearing sunglasses and slinging his arm around Bella, he’s the troubled 50s adolescent of fast cars and rebel cool reincarnated—the James Dean of the undead, with a jot of the Dylanesque. (In biology class, an owl’s pale wing seems to sprout from Edward’s shoulder, denoting his fallen-angel allure.) Together, Stewart and Pattinson seem to be sharing the same opium reverie (the modern vampire saga is often a junkie narrative in naked disguise—see Abel Ferrara’s The Addiction), with Stewart receiving the more powerful high, her eyes dimming out when she gets too close. There’s wit in their tentative exchanges. How old are you? she asks Edward. “Seventeen.” How long have you been 17? she presses. Pause. “Awhile.” But so what if Edward was born in 1901—the important thing is, he cares. Threatening to tear these two apart (literally) are the lusty appetite and savage glee of a vampire nomad named James (Cam Gigandet), ready to dine on Bella’s wrist as if it were a delectable lamb chop. She’s good eatin’, as Sarah Palin might say, and he’s a real sickie—evil, bad, mean, and inconsiderate, a camcorder gripped in his hand like a rock as he prepares to make Bella a virgin sacrifice in his own nasty brand of vampire porn. (The bite he leaves on her wrist is shaped like a bloody horseshoe.) It’s Edward to the rescue, and one of the unintended lessons of Twilight is that America has gotten so moribund that it’s the undead who come through in the clutch while the living go through their daily paces oblivious. They have more vitality and clarity than the average breather. The vampire clan in Twilight even has elevated taste in architecture—no gewgawed McMansion for them! Twilight is the Brideshead Revisited of the fanged and forever young.

Interview

VF Daily: Had you read the Twilight books before getting the script?
No, I hadn’t. I didn’t read the books until I got the part. I was working on another movie at the time and I only had time to read the script. I didn’t really want to focus on anything else, but everyone was saying the project was such a big deal that I had to read the books.

What was your initial impression of the project?
I thought it was really ambitious, this portrayal of the ultimate, most epic love story that could be. Also, Bella is not a typical female lead. The power balance between her and Edward is really skewed. Edward is this confident, perfect, idealistic man, although deep down he’s actually really afraid. Bella is naïve but also sure-footed. Whatever it is inside of her that drives her is stronger than she is. She just trusts the shit out of herself.

Bella and Edward, played by Robert Pattinson, share a very intense love in his film. How was it working with Robert?
Well, I basically cast him. We did one day of auditions and a bunch of guys came in. Catherine Hardwicke, the director, afterwards was like, “What do you think? This is such a hard choice.” I was like, “Are you kidding me!? Its such an obvious choice!” It couldn’t have been better. It was sort of perfect.

What did you do to prepare for your role?
We were always trying to figure out what it should feel like when Edward touched me, how far away he would have to be until he could smell me, things like that.

Are you naturally clumsy like your character?
Well, I’m definitely not the most graceful being, but it’s really difficult to be clumsy on cue. It’s like physical comedy. It was fun.

What was it like to work with this young cast?
We had such a big cast and we were all fairly close in age and we were together constantly. In that situation you might expect drama to ensue. But we were all so obsessed with this project. We were all focused on the same thing, and it was really creative and ambitious. Nikki Reed and I became really, really good friends. She’s really smart and funny. And we have a new movie that we’re working on together.

Hometown?
Woodland Hills, California. I’m a total Valley Girl.

Siblings?
Brothers. I’m the youngest.

Trademark style?
I’m a really typical girl. I look like everyone.

Favorite movie?
The Jungle Book. I love Disney movies!

TV shows that you TiVo?
I don’t watch TV.

Favorite book?
East of Eden.

Favorite cause?
I would love to be involved in a charity that helps kids who live on the street.

New York or L.A.?
New York.

Significant other?
Yes, Michael Angarano.

Celebrity crush?
Michael Angarano.