


All five Twilight movies are once again streaming on Netflix, and once again, audiences can’t seem to get enough of these sexy vampires. What can we say? We love nostalgia, we love camp, and we love absurdity, and Twilight delivers all three of those things in spades.
If you were a middle school girl in the late aughts, you either read Stephenie Meyer’s wildly popular vampire romance novel Twilight, or you consciously chose not to read it. But the first Twilight movie, directed by Catherine Hardwicke and released in 2008, took this steamy story to a whole new level. Robert Pattinson stars as Edward Cullen, the sexy, sparkly, 108-year-old vampire who, for whatever reason, decides to spend his immortal years at a public high school in Forks, Washington. And Kristen Stewart stars as the human high school student named Bella that Edward falls in love with.
It’s important to understand just how big the hype surrounding this movie was. Stephenie Meyer’s 2005 novel Twilight was the biggest thing since Harry Potter, and every 13-year-old girl had a copy. This was serious stuff. But in retrospect, everything about that movie is hilarious, unintentional camp. Catherine Hardwicke, then best known for directing the critically-acclaimed indie teen movie Thirteen, attempted to mash her artistic vision with the trashy romance source material, and the result is a bizarre, uncanny valley of melodrama and absurdity. But if there’s one thing Twilight has going for it, it’s that it’s never boring. Here are some of the funniest, weirdest, and most absurd moments from the first Twilight film.
-
Photo: Summit Entertainment Talk about a meet-cute: Bella, a new student at the school, gets seated next to Edward in biology class, and, as anyone who’s seen the movie knows, she smells irresistible to the vampire. But taken without context, the scene plays out like Edward is so disgusted by Bella’s body odor he’s going to vomit right on the desk. Edward then proceeds to spend the rest of class just glaring at Bella, which is made doubly hilarious by the fact that Hardwicke framed this shot to give Pattinson tiny little angel wings. Now that’s what I call camp.
-
Photo: Summit Entertainment My personal favorite of the Bella’s human friends at school is Eric, played by actor Justin Chon. Though he can’t have more than five minutes of screen time, Chon has gone down in Twilight fandom history for delivering one of the saga’s most inexplicably hilarious quotes: “Bella, look. It’s a worm.” It’s an extremely accurate portrayal of high school boy humor in the year 2008. Is Twilight actually a teen movie masterpiece? Only time will tell.
-
Photo: Summit Entertainment Twilight was not the first, nor the last, movie guilty of a cliché Google research montage. And yet, the close-up of the word “speed” in Papyrus font gets me every time.
-
Photo: Summit Entertainment Not only does Mike (played by Michael Welch) shake his gross, wet hat all over Bella, he does it while exclaiming, “How you likin’ the rain, girl? Better get used it, girl!” That’s two “girls” in the span of 30 seconds. Again, this movie really gets just how annoying and weird teen boys can be.
-
Photo: Summit Entertainment The indisputable high point of any Twilight rewatch, especially if there’s alcohol involved, is the vampire baseball scene. Accompanied by Muse’s “Supermassive Black Hole”—written for the film, and arguably one of the best things these movies produced—this scene is pure fun. But the part that always makes me laugh out loud is the end of this sequence, when the bad vampires—played by Cam Gigandet, Rachelle Lefevre, and Edi Gathegi—crash the party by strolling through the forest on what seems to be a people-mover. I think of this scene every time I’m on a moving sidewalk at the airport.
-
Yes, this infamous moment is real. This line of dialogue—which was not in the book—is uttered by Edward to Bella before he carries her through the trees. It has plagued the Twilight fandom for over. What even is a spider-monkey? When we heard this in the theater, we know it was all over for us.
-
Photo: Summit Entertainment I’m starting to think the Cullen family has a thing about monkeys, because Rosalie utters this line after witnessing her husband, Emmett, climb a tree to make a spectacular catch during the baseball scene. It’s not just the phrase here, it’s the delivery from actor Nikki Reed. She makes it very clear that her monkey man will be getting some tonight.
-
Photo: Summit Entertainment Perhaps the most ridiculous scene in the movie is the one where Edward finally fesses up to being a vampire. There’s a lot to cringe at here, like “Say it. Out loud,” or “How long have you been 17?” (Don’t blame Hardwicke—these lines of dialogue come straight from Meyers’s novel.) But the worst is when a very serious, very tortured Pattinson bites out, “This is what I am,” rips open his shirt, stands in the sunlight and… sparkles. And no, the CGI is not good.
-
Photo: Summit Entertainment Actor Billy Burke, who plays Bella’s dad Charlie, was the MVP of the Twilight movies. He steals every scene with his impeccable comedic timing, and never fails to make me laugh. And the best part? We’re actually supposed to be laughing.