The Twilight saga may have been a very successful series of bestselling books, but the movies made the plots gorier and improved the story of the franchise as a result. While author Stephenie Meyers’ Twilight saga received a lot of unnecessary critical hate, the teen phenomenon did have some genuine weak spots when it came to the writing of the source novels. For one thing, Meyers’ Twilight saga was shockingly bloodless for a story of vampires fighting werewolves, and, to many readers, the anodyne, conflict-light story felt like a missed opportunity for some fun action set-pieces.
However, the Twilight movies improved on this issue by slipping some more dramatic action than the source material provided. Perhaps the most dramatic case of this was when director Catherine Hardwicke added a murder mystery subplot to the original Twilight, but there were subtler instances throughout the rest of the blockbuster saga. Consistently, the directors working on Twilight’s movie adaptations found darker, more mature moments that the source stories shied away from and put them front and center, resulting in a more violent, visceral, and ultimately rewarding storytelling experience.
Although the Twilight movies strained to stay accurate to the source novels, the adaptations still managed to add in some violence and action by depicting onscreen some of the important scenes that occurred off-screen in the books. The movies were stronger for it, with 30 Days of Night director David Slade introducing some scares to the otherwise child-friendly series with 2010’s underrated Twilight outing Eclipse. However, this approach did not always pay off for the filmmakers. For example, the infamous takeout ending of Breaking Dawn Part 2 endeavored to make the saga’s much-hyped finale more exciting by adding a string of brutal deaths, but then retconned all of them in a cowardly last-minute twist.
How Twilight’s Movies Adaptations Added Violence
The Twilight movies were very faithful to Meyers’ novels, which meant that each of the movie’s directors had to be canny about adding more gore to the story with betraying the atmosphere of the bestselling novels. The main trick that Hardwicke, Slade, and Breaking Dawn director Bill Condon used was depicting scenes from the novels that characters aren’t present for, but later describe, onscreen in all their gory glory when it came time to shoot the Twilight movies. Similarly, scenes that the POV character passes out before (like the death of Cam Gigandet’s Twilight villain James) are shown in the Twilight movie adaptations instead of being cut away from. Finally, scenes that were sparsely described in the books earn much more attention onscreen, such as Rosalie’s backstory.
Where The Twilight Saga Added More Gore
There are numerous moments throughout the adaptions where the Twilight movies added more violence by lingering longer on dark scenes that the source novels barely touched on. For example, in Eclipse, Rosalie’s revenge rampage is more detailed than it is in the novels and the climactic battle between the werewolves/Cullens and Victoria’s vampire army is actually seen instead of being described after the fact. In both cases, these are pretty pivotal scenes that the novel plays down, with Rosalie’s entire origin story earning only a few paragraphs in Meyers’ original novel Eclipse and the battle being entirely missed by the POV characters of the book (who are “safe” hiding on a hilltop at the time of the attack). Both changes were to the benefit of Eclipse, with Rosalie’s dark Twilight backstory often being singled out by fans as one of the strongest scenes in the entire series and the battle being a solid slice of surprisingly harsh action. Meanwhile, in the original Twilight, James’ attack on Edward and Bella and his subsequent fight to the death are both seen onscreen, where the novel has Bella pass out before any fighting happens.
Why Twilight’s Added Violence Worked
Since the Twilight series still stayed so close to the story of the novels, no one could accuse the creators of taking too many creative liberties. However, adding in some moments of violence helped up the action quotient of the Twilight movies and left the saga feeling more like the big-budget blockbuster franchise it was, rather than a smaller romance with added vampires. As the Denali coven’s cut backstory proves, the Twilight series had no lack of ambitious and immersive world-building but the novels themselves were still inhibited to a small-scale story that began and ended in the small town of Forks. Thus, the addition of big battle sequences like the ending of Eclipse helped the Twilight franchise feel more like a large-scale fantasy project, although this impulse was not always to the benefit of the cinematic saga.
Where Twilight’s Movie Additions Went Too Far
While adding action and gore to the originally harmless story of Twilight generally created a more mature and engaging series for viewers, there were times when the creators took this approach too far. Turning the happy ending of Breaking Dawn Part 2 into a bloody battle with numerous major character deaths added, only to then reveal it was all a vision and stick with the novel’s sentimental ending, was very clearly an excuse to shoehorn some trailer moments into a movie light on psychical conflict and action. It was a cheap trick and one the series couldn’t pull off, proving that not all the Twilight saga’s added action worked.
Even many ardent fans of the Twilight novels largely disliked the addition of a fantasy segue into the ending of the final movie, since the underwhelming ending of the books at least never promised a bloody free-for-all that it failed to deliver on. In contrast, the ending of Breaking Dawn Part 2 killed off Twilight villain Marcus and the heroic Carlisle Cullen, only to then reveal that none of its action actually happened. It was a blatant attempt by the creators to have their proverbial cake and eat it, staging a massive action set-piece only to then undo all the dramatics story-shaking events through a reveal almost as corny as “it was all a dream.” Thus, the ending of Breaking Dawn Part 2 proved that the strategy of sneaking more violence and action into the Twilight movies was not a surefire system, although it did help earlier movies in the saga to feel more impactful and exciting.
