Supernatural Studies 80 Bella and the Beast: When Vampires Fall in Love, or the Twilight of a Genre Marko Lukić and Ljubica Matek The early twenty-first century saw an enormous rise of both production of and interest in vampire-related books, series and movies. As Gelder pointed out, while the vampires’ nature is fundamentally conservative because they cannot stop doing what they do, that is, drink blood, culturally they are highly adaptable, which is why the overuse of the vampire motif is not that surprising. They can signify a range of meanings and positions in the culture and simultaneously appeal to or create fundamental urges such as desire, anxiety and fear (141). Gordon and Hollinger believe that it is this rich metaphorical usefulness what kept the vampires “undead” in contemporary popular culture (3) and, accordingly, it would be reasonable to expect that such “pliability” would enable the postmodern vampires, who seem to be an excellent means for enticing mass consumption, to address a wide range of topics in order to satisfy the interests of the contemporary audience. It seems as if the consumption-compulsion that drives the culture of late capitalism, where the bloodsucking factory owners of the nineteenth century have been replaced by the vampiric self-replication of the brand, may indicate that Western consumers are, as a group, possessed; that Gothic may offer a particularly suggestive mode for expressing the zeitgeist. (Spooner 127) The great popularity of Stephenie Meyer’s novels and their adaptations to film created a domino effect (Klosterman 1) resulting in rapid production of numerous vampire books, movies and series. 1 While Twilight and its sequels may seem to promote the vampire story, they are for the most part not interested in vampires as complex and perverse creatures at all. According to Klosterman, Twilight series is not about vampirism anyway, but about the nostalgia for teenage chastity. Its success is based on the attractiveness of its film cast and the fact that contemporary fiction consumers tend to prefer long serialized novels that can be read rapidly (1). What is more, Twilight saga and its movie adaptations do not imply an increased interest in the elements and narratives belonging to the Gothic literary tradition, and they do not contribute to the development or revival of the vampire genre in the literary sense. From its beginnings, the Gothic genre served as an outlet for contemporary anxieties connected with complex issues such as sexuality, gender, race and class as well as a means to cope with continuous social distress and fluctuations caused by urbanization and scientific,