twilight

This is embarrassing. I watched part of a twilight movie last night. Not the whole thing, only about half an hour. Yes, there was a girl involved. And we did turn it off to do something more interesting, which makes me vaguely less humiliated. The stuff I'll sink to.....
     Anyway, while I was wasting thirty minutes of my life on that film, a question kept coming up in my mind. Has anyone involved in that movie read Dracula? The reason I ask is because Bram Stoker wrote the book that got people interested in vampires to begin with. I read it for school a couple years ago, as part of a class on early British fiction. Dracula is not actually a novel, it's structured as a collection of letters and diary entries from the various characters. It's also insanely violent. I'm talking graphic, detailed depictions of extremely unpleasant thing happening to a lot of bodies.
      If you think about it, vampires can be a seriously powerful fictional device. There are obvious sexual aspects to it, with the ideas of nighttime visits, penetration, etc etc. Also the plague, which was a major concern in England at the time Stoker was writing. A distortion of nature caused by contact between bodily fluids. The same thing can be tweaked and used for foreign invasion. In any case, lots of options.
      I don't particularly care if filmmakers want to take someone else's creation and use it for a different purpose. I didn't even hate the twilight movie. It seemed like a fairly harmless teen romance kind of thing. Definitely not something i'd watch by choice, but it's existence doesn't harm the world. What really bothered me was seeing Stoker's dark, brutal, fairly brilliant creation sparkling in the sun. Adaptation is one thing, but at least preserve the essence of what you're ripping off.