Elegant bloodsuckers

Twilight (M) 3½ stars National release THE vampire film is the sexiest genre of screen horror and also the most threatening.

Kristen Stewart in no danger whatsoever with Robert Pattinson in a scene from the eerily beautiful Twilight

Twilight (M) 3½ stars National release THE vampire film is the sexiest genre of screen horror and also the most threatening.

The vampire, traditionally though not exclusively male, was originally portrayed in silent films such as F.W. Murnau's masterly Nosferatu (1922) as a hideous creature who invaded the bedrooms of beautiful virgins and perversely deflowered them by sucking their blood.

When Hollywood discovered the vampire a few years later, in Tod Browning's London After Midnight (1927), with Lon Chaney, and the same director's Dracula (1931), with Bela Lugosi, the pattern was essentially the same: an evil-looking man in a position of power threatens and ravishes innocents, both male and female.

As time went by, vampires were more often portrayed as handsome and sensual, by actors such as Christopher Lee (in Terence Fisher's Dracula, 1958) or Frank Langella (in John Badham's Dracula, 1979), though Francis Ford Coppola returned to basics with a fearsomely ugly Gary Oldman in his 1992 retelling of the Bram Stoker story.

There have been female vampires, too; beautiful, seductive creatures in films such as Carl Dreyer's Vampyr (1932) and Roger Vadim's Blood and Roses (1960), both of which were loosely based on Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla. There have been countless variations since of this most durable genre, including Kathryn Bigelow's creepily memorable Near Dark, about a family of vampires prowling present-day Texas.

The latest vampire movie to arrive in cinemas, Twilight, was also made by a female director, Catherine Hardwicke, best known for her excellent 2003 feature debut, Thirteen, about the problems of puberty.

Twilight is an adaptation of the hugely successful 2005 novel by Stephenie Meyer that, if not quite in the Harry Potter class, has found an eager readership among young people the world over, as have its sequels New Moon, Eclipse and Breaking Dawn.

Meyer has tapped cleverly into the world of forbidden love; her central character, Bella Swan, played in the film by the talented young actor Kristen Stewart, is an ordinary 17-year-old with the usual family problems (separated parents) who falls in love: not with a boy of whom her father disapproves for the usual reasons but with a dashingly handsome vampire.

This strange and eerily beautiful story unfolds in the small town of Fork, Washington (the wettest place in the continental US, we're told), where Bella has moved from sunny Arizona to live with her policeman father, Charlie (Billy Burke). Everything about her new home is strange: the dank weather, her father's job (investigating mysterious killings where the victims have apparently been attacked by an animal) and high school.

Not that Bella, an attractive, easygoing girl, has too much trouble fitting in. She soon makes friends. But from the moment she sees Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), the handsome, pale-skinned, dark-eyed son of the local doctor (Peter Facinelli), she's smitten. And, though Edward tries to avoid her at first, it's obviously mutual.

The extended Cullen family are by no means your traditional vampires. There's nothing here about not having a reflection in mirrors, or being afraid of garlic or crucifixes, or sleeping in coffins during the daylight hours.

Edward thinks nothing of spending time outdoors in daylight and when a rare ray of sunlight seeps through the grey skies of the northwest Rocky Mountains region, all that happens is that he develops shiny crystals on his hands and face, which is very fetching.

The Cullens are vegetarian vampires; they have forsworn human blood and only drink the blood of animals, which makes them good guys, relatively speaking. Not so some of the other vampires who roam the area and whose thirst for human blood is undiminished.

Essentially, this is the classic story of a wilful girl who falls in love with the wrong guy and is prepared (at first) to accept the consequences. No wonder teenage girls have embraced the books and will no doubt embrace the film as well, especially as Pattinson, who played Cedric Diggory in a couple of the Harry Potter films, is so soulful and so dishy.

There's a bleakly funny scene in which Edward takes Bella home to meet his family, a lopsided reworking of a typically awkward occasion to which most people can respond.

Perhaps Twilight would have been even more effective if it had been more horrific; these vampires are presented in an almost a matter-of-fact way, as if they're not all that different from the other families we see.

Hardwicke and her screenwriter, Melissa Rosenberg, also tend to pace the story a little too slowly. But the film's achievement is to make an unbelievable situation surprisingly real and tangible; the excellent cast plays it straight, without a hint of the overblown, and the result is that Bella's infatuation and her dangerous journey into a world of passionate love is, for the most part, immensely compelling.