Twilight AND The Haunting of Molly Hartley: Oddly Similar

So last week at home, enjoying renting crappy movies from the video store, I rented "The Haunting of Molly Hartley", a satanic scary movie that I knew would be bad but awesome, and the teen fandom crazy phenomenon "Twilight" about the vampires in high school. There were, oddly enough, many similarities.

• The basic plot is this: A girl moves to a new town with a new school, to live with only one parent (though she has two) for complex reasons.
• Both girls realize something spooky is going on there, something that wasn't going on at home. Molly Hartley is hearing/seeing creepy things, and Bella in "Twilight" thinks there are vampires.
• Both girls look too skinny and are pale (heroine chic coming back in?)
• Evil forces are trying to kill/eat the girl.
• Both girls fall for a guy who is not what he seems.

I watched them on the same day (oh the joys of vacation) and so was hyper aware of these similarities.

Anyway, onto what I thought of them. I am a die-hard Anne Rice fan (that's "Interview with a Vampire" etc.), so have been very skeptical of this "Twilight" series since it came out. Plus I've seen how crazy the fans were. I can't speak for the book, but the movie was actually alright. It was a solid vampire movie. Not amazing, it's no "Nosferatu", but it was pretty much a teenage romance plus vampire movie, and for what it set out to achieve I think it did that pretty well. Robert Pattison was a believable vampire, with his staring moody eyes and overly-giant looking head. The girl was ok, not my favorite but I think she did pretty well. The best was the vampire 'family' though, they were so cute! Ok, so maybe that's the wrong word, but I liked them. And, interesting vampire lore here, according to the vampires in this film the vampire bite delivers a venom that kills the victim unless the vampire turns them into a vampire too. So no sexy blood sucking, that's reserved only for the bad vampires.

I don't really feel the need to talk about "The Haunting of Molly Hartley", it was a good spooky will-the-devil-win horror movie. Nothing special, but entertaining.