While The Invitation tries to make its vampires scary, evil, and sexy at the same time, in the process the muddled gothic romance/survival horror movie proves that the much-mocked Twilight saga was right to give up on the former qualities. The Twilight movies changed a lot about traditional vampire lore. However, the Twilight saga arguably got more grief than the series earned for this decision, as proven by the issues that plagued The Invitation.

While the Twilight saga’s movies added new characters and minor plot points here and there, the adaptations were still largely true to the bestselling novels. This meant that the Twilight movies, like the massively successful books, featured vampires who drank animal blood, walked around in the daytime, and passed themselves off as (relatively) normal high schoolers instead of aloof aristocrats who shunned conventional human society. While this was seen as sacrilege by some fans of vampires, The Invitation’s failures prove that the Twilight movies may have made the right choice.

The Invitation scared up some success at the box office, but left critics unimpressed with its familiar story of “girl meets vampire” gothic horror romance. Mixing Ready Or Not-inspired satire with a straightforward vampire romance, The Invitation tells the tale of a struggling artist, Evie, who gets her golden ticket when a DNA test informs her she is related to a wealthy family of English aristocrats. Soon, Evie is whisked off to a lavish (and remote) English estate to attend the wedding with her relatives. There, she meets the charismatic lord of the manor Walter, whose ability to walk around during the day and seemingly normal charm means he can’t possibly be a vampire. To Evie’s understandable dismay, the handsome, rich, charismatic Walter does turn out to be a vampire after all and attempts to take her as his bride. This is where The Invitation’s problems start in earnest, and where The Invitation proves that the Twilight saga's “disappointing” vampires were a clever storytelling choice.

What The Invitation Gets Right


The Invitation’s fusion of gothic romance and socially conscious horror manages to update a lot of Dracula’s old tropes effectively via DNA tests, video calls, and aristocrats who might just be classist boors but could be something much worse. Before the big, inevitable reveal, The Invitation’s Dracula stand-in is charming and seductive, and the romance is a lot less awkward than Twilight’s infamously goofy love story. Nathalie Emmanuel’s appealing Evie sells some hokey lines with easy charm and her eventual transformation into a tough action heroine is entirely believable thanks to the actor’s history in the genre. However, The Invitation’s attempts to fuse Get Out with Dracula fall apart when The Invitation can’t decide if its vampires are meant to be glamorous or scary, something that the Twilight movies never struggled with.

Where The Invitation Goes Wrong


Even the Twilight saga’s most dangerous villains didn’t have many threatening powers since the series didn’t want to scare off viewers who were there for the melodramatic romance. While there were werewolves and vampires in the Twilight saga, they were about as scary as the werewolves and vampires of the Hotel Transylvania movies and, despite how unlikely this may sound, this ultimately worked in the saga’s favor. In The Invitation, the vampires are both monstrous killers and uber-wealthy aristocrats, which makes them perfect horror villains but terrible romantic leads. As soon as their true nature is revealed, there is no question that Evie needs to flee or kill them—both of which she does in short order, sapping the story of any surprise.

At first, The Invitation's story of a down-on-her-luck city girl getting whisked off her feet and brought to a mysterious European haven feels like a Netflix Christmas movie premise. Then, after the true nature of Walter and company is revealed, Evie is instantly dropped into a survival horror movie. There is no point at which viewers are left to wonder whether Evie might want to marry this powerful, immortal, and undeniably charming antihero, and there is no chance for viewers to be seduced by Walter since The Invitation keeps cutting to scenes of his maids being eaten alive by shadowy monsters. No one wants to hook up with Kurt Barlow no matter how rich the Salem’s Lot villain is, and The Invitation proves that sexy vampires can’t co-exist with scary bloodsucking monster vampires in the same love story.

The Invitation Proves Twilight Dropped The Right Vampire Tropes


Twilight’s vampires were infamous for being un-scary and surprisingly non-violent and The Invitation is a great example of why this was necessary. While True Blood took Twilight’s “girl meets vampire” conceit and played it for gory horror, Twilight took the same story and turned it into teenage wish fulfillment. Edward and Bella’s romance wasn’t interrupted by awkward questions about how no one noticed the Cullens acting as if they lived in the 1800s, or how many people Edward's family murdered for food because the Twilight saga’s adaptations cut any elements of traditional vampire depictions that weren’t suited to a PG romance. While this led to a lot of online arguments over whether these were “real” vampires, the approach also allowed Twilight to pick a tone and stick to it, something that The Invitation proved isn’t all that easy.

What Twilight Got Right About Vampire Romance


From changing the rules of vampires so that they weren’t automatically murderers to making them able to walk in the sun, the Twilight movies succeeded at the box office because the series altered enough elements to make vampires harmless and appealing as tween movie love interests. While this was sacrilege to some genre purists, it worked for the tone of the Twilight movies. The Invitation’s awkward, uneven tone, which lurches from creepy murder scenes to sunlit romantic banter, showed it is difficult to depict vampires as both monstrous undead killers and sexy romantic antiheroes, proving that the Twilight movies were not misguided in this decision. While the Twilight saga may have annoyed a lot of genre fans with its depiction of PG-rated vampires, The Invitation’s inability to balance scary with sexy proves that the franchise was not wrong to pick a tone and stick with it.