ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at films released so far in the series adapting Stephenie Meyer's Twilight novels, which portray a young teenage woman, Bella, falling in love with a vampire and involved in the destiny of her love, Edward, and his vampire family. It argues that these texts provide particular ideological interventions into specific historical situations and that their allegories provide varying and often contrasting moral and ideological messages. Since the appearance of the 1992 film Buffy the Vampire Slayer (BtVS) and the popular 1997-2003 TV series based on it, Buffy has become a cult figure of global media culture, with a panorama of websites, copious media and scholarly dissection, academic conferences, and a fandom that continues to devour reruns and DVDs of the 144 episodes. The chapter describes BtVS also has an allegorical level that makes it more interesting than just a self-contained vampire-slayer narrative and mythology or conventional story of growing up in the contemporary United States.
