It began with a dream
Stephenie Meyer, a mother of three in Arizona who had never written a novel, woke on 2 June 2003 from a vivid dream: a girl and a beautiful VAMPIRE talking in a sunlit MEADOW, the vampire explaining that he wanted to drink her blood but loved her too much to do it. She wrote the scene down that day. It became a chapter in the middle of TWILIGHT, and she wrote the rest of the book around it in about three months.
The book came out in 2005 and began a series of four novels that sold well over a hundred million copies around the world. The five films followed between 2008 and 2012. In 2020 Meyer published Midnight Sun, which retells the first book from Edward's point of view.
Why the story is set in Forks
Meyer wanted a place with almost no sunshine, because her vampires cannot go out in bright sun without giving themselves away. She searched for the rainiest places in the United States and found FORKS, a small logging town on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State, near one of the wettest rainforests in North America. She had never been there when she wrote the book.
After the books became famous, Forks filled with visitors. Local shops put up signs about vampires and werewolves, and a house in town was dressed up as the home of BELLA's father, CHARLIE.
Vampires that sparkle
In most older stories, sunlight destroys vampires. That idea is newer than it seems: in Bram Stoker's Dracula, the count walks about in daylight and is simply weaker, and one of the first films to show sunlight killing a vampire was Nosferatu in 1922. Meyer went another way entirely. Her vampires SPARKLE in the sun, their skin shining like diamonds, so EDWARD CULLEN has to keep out of it.
The CULLEN family — CARLISLE, a doctor, ESME, and their adopted children ALICE, JASPER, EMMETT and ROSALIE — call themselves vegetarian vampires because they drink animal blood rather than human. The VOLTURI, an ancient COVEN in Italy, act as the rulers of vampire law.
A real tribe behind the story
JACOB Black belongs to the Quileute, a real Native American people who live at La Push, near Forks. In the books, some Quileute can turn into wolves, and a WEREWOLF can IMPRINT, bonding for life with one person. The real Quileute Tribe has its own traditions, including a story that its first people were created from wolves, and it has said the novels borrowed from its culture. Many readers learned about the real tribe through the books.
Our mythical creatures page covers the much older werewolf legends of Europe.
The rest of the grid
Bella chooses to become a vampire at the end of the series, and her daughter RENESMEE, half human and half vampire, becomes the centre of the final battle. VENOM passes on the change from human to vampire in Meyer's world.
The first film was directed by Catherine Hardwicke, and at the time it had the biggest opening weekend ever for a film directed by a woman.