This document compares and contrasts the vampire films Twilight and Stake Land. It summarizes that Stake Land depicts a post-apocalyptic world where vicious vampires emerge at night to terrorize people, while Twilight depicts vampires that can walk in sunlight but sparkle and have other supernatural abilities. While Stake Land follows typical vampire conventions, Twilight modernizes conventions like vulnerability to sunlight. The document questions whether changing conventions could revitalize the vampire genre by providing new creative opportunities.

1. Twilight V Stake Land
By Benn Kelly

2. What Is This?
I’m going to be talking about how the typical
horror conventions are used in the film.
The two films I will be using are Twilight directed
by Catherine Hardwicke and Stake Land directed
by Jim Mickle. These films have two very
different ideas on what vampires are from what
everyone believes and what no one would of
guessed.

3. Brief Overview
• Stake Land is set in a Apocalyptic, were the
world is in terror of the night as viscous
Vampires come out a wreck havoc on people.
A young boy called Martin’s family is
slaughtered by Vampires and a Vampire
Hunter referred to as ‘Mister’ takes Martin
and trains him as a Vampire Hunter. They then
head north to ‘New Eden’ which is a safe zone.

4. Brief Overview
• Twilight is about a girl names Bella who
moved in with her father in a place called
Forks and then falls for a
Vampire, Edward, that lives near by and goes
to her school. Her life is soon in danger when
she is stalked by a Vampire called James who
seeks to kill her and Edward, but she is saved
and James gets killed by Edward and Edward
continues to then save Bella’s life by sucking
the poison from her blood.

5. The Conventions In The Films
• The only Typical conventions used in Twilight
are the fact that they have fangs and can be
killed by being staked in the heart or have
there head severed to be killed.
• When looking at Stake Land it uses all the
typical stereotypes, for example only coming
out at night, being savage creatures that kill
everything and there’s a hero that sets out to
kill vampires.

6. What’s Different?
• Stake Land have followed most typical Vampire
conventions to a T. Unfortunately Twilight have
not.
• Twilight have changed the idea that they cannot
come out in daylight and turned it into they can
but they sparkle in it. They have given them all
different superpowers, typically they may have an
ability like they may have super strength or
heightened senses, now they have the ability to
read minds. They have to the fear people had for
Vampires and turned it into a romantic thing.

7. Could This Be A Good Thing?
• Could the fact that when people think of
vampires they think ‘ahh they can come out
during the day now’ actually help the vampire
conventions, making it more scary directors
could use this and adapt it to give vampires
the fear they deserve once again. Give people
and fans more to think about. From my view
the Vampire franchise seems to be dying.