When it comes to Cool Factor, let’s be honest: author Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight vampires are far from the top. They aren’t as bloodthirsty as Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire’s Lestat De Lioncourt, nor do they pull off a leather outfit as cool as Underworld’s Selene. Worst of all, and what no doubt made them figures of ridicule even years after the first film was released in 2008, they sparkle. No matter how you look at it, it’s hard to defend vampires that look like a child’s art project.
Hard, but not impossible. Because, as much as Twilight’s vampires pale in comparison to the ones we see in gnarlier horror tales like Bram Stoker’s Dracula and 30 Days of Night, they do hold a unique place in the creature’s legacy. Meyer created the X-Men of vampires.
In nearly every iteration, from outlandish to grounded, vampires possess otherworldly powers, including super strength, heightened senses, and immortality. The Twilight vampires have all that too (yawn) — but there’s a twist. Each time someone is transformed into a vampire, their strongest trait from their human life is carried over into their new life as a vampire. Vampires are essentially “born again” when they transform, similar to how Marvel’s mutants come into their powers as they grow up. For example, Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) originally stood out as a human Edward (Robert Pattinson) whose mind he couldn’t read. When she’s transformed into a vampire, Bella’s resistance to psychic powers grows even stronger, acting as a mental shield that she’s able to grant to others and protect them from psionic harm. Think of it like the X-Men’s X gene, which can manifest any time in a mutant’s lifetime and works almost like mutant puberty. Rogue isn’t exactly a vampire, but her powers of absorbing the life energy (and powers) of others reveal themselves during a kiss with a boy is pretty close.
The X-Men comps can look quite literal when you start breaking it down. Alice Cullen (Ashley Greene) receives prophetic visions. They’re imperfect — Alice makes the mistake of thinking Bella died in New Moon — but the visions also allow her to track enemy movements in the same vein as X-Men characters like Blindspot and Professor X. In fact, in Breaking Dawn, it is Alice’s ability that allows her to keep tabs on the vampire coven, the Volturi, and warn her family of the danger they pose. Edward ‘s ability allows him to read the minds of others, like Jean Grey, and Jasper Hale (Jackson Rathbone) is able to manipulate the emotions of others, just like the mutant, Empath.
These powers play a significant role in the Cullens’ fight against the Volturi in Breaking Dawn. After the royal coven realizes that Edward and Bella had a half-human, half-vampire baby, its leaders grow concerned about the future of the “superior” vampire race, which they fear may be threatened by this new hybrid. Battle lines are drawn, and while the ensuing bloodbath in Breaking Dawn – Part 2 ends up being a fakeout, the sequence shows how lethal these abilities can be. Bella uses her mind shield abilities to protect Jasper from Jane’s (Dakota Fanning) pain illusion ability, which works until Bella’s concentration is broken. There’s also Alec (Cameron Bright), who is able to cut off the senses of the Cullens, making them vulnerable.
While none of these powers have produced splash pages on par with Storm’s ability to control the weather or Wolverine’s adamantium claws, it gives each Twilight vampire a unique identifier beyond the tropes, and raises the stakes of their plight. Meyer and the screenwriters who’ve adapted her works have flexed these abilities in a political battle about the future of the vampire race, which, to those who can look past the sparkles, falls into the same vein as the many battles between Professor Xavier’s X-Men and Magneto’s Brotherhood of Mutants. The Brotherhood of Mutants believes it is superior to humans, and the Volturi think and feel much the same, even though much of the coven’s primary concern is actively hiding from humanity so that a direct confrontation won’t be necessary. Not exactly vampire domination on paper, but the Volturi do treat human beings as livestock, and they see Bella and Edward’s half-human, half-vampire daughter as an abomination of their race. The Cullens and X-Men, however, want to live in harmony with the human community.
Furthermore, Meyer positions the Twilight vampires as experiencing some level of conflict because of these powers. Rosalie’s (insert name here) powers of unnatural beauty have led her into scraps with men, and while Alice is tough, her powers can sap a lot of her strength, which feels very much like Jean Grey’s constant fainting spells in the 1992-1997 animated series of X-Men. One of the things that attracts Edward to Bella in the first place is that he can’t read her thoughts, so he has to actively work to get to know her. Meyer, going down the route of having some vampires see their powers as more of a curse than a blessing, adds a familiar depth we see in vampire media. Some vampires regret becoming one, with Rosalie in particular despising Bella for so much of the series because she see’s Bella wanting to be a vampire as a privileged position. Rosalie had no choice in becoming one, and the fact that her natural beauty — which is positioned as being the reason why she got assaulted by men — was further enhanced at her turning, is a kick in the teeth. It’s similar to how some of the mutants in the X-Men franchise yearn to be cured of their abilities, with Rogue taking the cure in 2006’s X-Men: The Last Stand.
With so many similarities between The Cullens and X-Men, it’s startling that Meyer took a cool concept and decided to sprinkle glitter on it. The Twilight vampire sparkle has earned its derision for how utterly bizarre it is, yet, despite how long these sparkly vampires have been mocked over the years, they still remain beloved for one big reason: Meyer took the romanticism of vampires and the cool appeal of superheroes and meshed them into one. Even before Twilight was first published, Meyer was stepping into an already teeming world of vampires. She had to make them stand out. And so, by X-Men-ifying her vampires, she gave her audience something even better: a unique emblem readers could identify with. Who hasn’t grown up debating whether Cyclops’ powers are better than, say, Nightcrawler’s?
Audiences love a power ranking because we want to align ourselves alongside them. The same goes for Twilight’s vampires, who have far more thought into their existence than what meets the eye. You just have to be brave enough to look under the glitter first.
