I can’t remember the last time I was at a screening where the audience screamed in anticipation when the lights went down and the show began. But the audience for Twilight was not your standard jaded preview crowd. They were almost entirely girls of about 12-16 years of age. There were a few parents in tow, but if any of the tweenies had bought dates I couldn’t see them.

After ascertaining that I had not mistakenly wandered into a showing of High School Musical 3, I asked a helpful publicist what was going on and learned what the rest of the house already knew, that Twilight is based on the first in a series of wildly popular teen novels about the relationship between a misfit girl and a hunky young vampire. (Well, he was young when he became a vampire, and so he has stayed.) In other words, this was not to be a movie made for me or, as I understand our demographics, you either, dear reader. Still, I stayed for the benefit of reporting to those of you who monitor your children’s choices in moviegoing and can tell you that, unless you have a blanket policy of keeping your kids away from anything that, like Halloween, promotes devil worship (in which case you’re probably also not in our demographic), you don’t have much to worry about here. On the scales of both horror and romance, Twilight is as squeaky-clean as you could hope for. You see, Edward and the rest of his vampire family are ethical sorts who survive on animal blood, and while he is carnally (in both senses of the word) drawn to Bella, he knows that he must restrain himself to be her protector rather than her lover. In other words, romance without any of that icky sex. Director Catherine Hardwicke hones in directly on the readers of the books, making no concession to older audiences or those supposedly all-important young males. As Bella, Kristen Stewart is hardly the homely girl described in the novels, but not so pretty that she precludes identification, while Robert Pattinson as Edward is so pretty that the only possible male reaction is to want to smack him one. The female reaction, though, was an ear-splitting squeal when he first arrived onscreen. Though a few girls sitting near me complained on the way out of the theater that too much of the novel was omitted (“They didn’t even say ‘I love you’!”) the rest of the crowd gobbled it up. Sometimes, as with the Beatles, the squealing girls are harbingers of something new and important. But sometimes they’re just squealing girls.

—m. faust