Yesterday night, a thunderstorm caused a power failure in our neighbourhood that lasted for several hours and. after lighting up all the house candles together, we took this opportunity to watch the movie Twilight on a laptop, as this was one of my daughter’s birthday presents. I had not read any of the books previously, except for a few pages of the first volume, and I alas found the movie quite appalling, both in the acting and in the scenario… Apart from Bram Stoker’s magistral Dracula, I actually never had much interest in vampire stories and Twilight does nothing against this lack of interest! The plot is very thin, mostly predictable, centred around an unlikely love story, and the actors are not helping either. The main female character, Bella, sounds almost idiotic, in that she does not seem to have much of a perspective in life besides falling in love, and her boyfriend Edward is not far behind in his inability to explain his difference both from humans and “bad” vampires. In the movie, the special effects are terrible (especially the “superpower” baseball game!) and the actors are uniformly unconvincing. I can see why the whole thing appeals to a teen niche and it apparently worked very well, judging from the box-office ranking as well as from the reactions of my daughter and her friends, but I would not advise anyone to watch it, even on a dark stormy night! It simply does not stand the comparison with Harry Potter which, while also primarily directed at a young adult audience, has sufficient depth and literary qualities to reach a much wider audience.