Latest Twilight movie hits movie screens across America

Story from Here & Now. Listen to the above audio for a complete report.

The latest on-screen installment of the Twilight series, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1, has arrived on movie screens across the country.

The film adaptations of Stephenie Meyer‘s “Twilight” novels have already grossed almost $2 billion worldwide. The newest one, which opened Friday, features the long-awaited wedding of the human Bella and her vampire-lover Edward.

It also includes Bella’s subsequent pregnancy with a half-vampire, half-human child — a pregnancy that puts her life in danger.

The series has long been interpreted as an allegory about abstinence and implies that loving a vampire could kill a human.

Harvard extension school dean Sue Weaver Schopf, however, said the birth of Bella’s child is an allegory on society’s discomfort with racial and ethnic mixing.

Schopf teaches the “Twilight” books and films as part of her course on “The Vampire in Literature and Film.”

She said Meyer’s story has found such a wide audience because the author taps into the intensity of teenage emotion and references love stories like Romeo and Juliet while giving her star-crossed lovers a happy ending. But, she also in some ways challenges those stories because in Meyer’s books, there is a happy ending.

“It’s actually possible for a relationship involving star-crossed lover, there’s actually a possibility of … it (ending happily), and that’s a very attractive fantasy,” Schopf said.

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