For some fans, it’s also too short not to shout that love out loud, whether on a T-shirt or on a tattoo. Corinne Phillips says that while she watched the movies when they first came out, it wasn’t until recently that she really started making Twilight-inspired gear to sell in her Etsy store. “I was running a race, and so I made a shirt that said [Edward’s line] ‘As if you could outrun me,’ because I’m very slow and I thought it would be funny, and then it just grew from there,” she says. “A few people ordered it, and so I made stickers of the same design. Somebody posted it on TikTok over Labor Day weekend, and out of nowhere it just blew up. Last month I sold like $4,000 worth of fan-inspired merch on Etsy and now my kids’ Christmas is paid for by Twilight.”
Quebec-based tattoo artist Marie Baillargeon had a similar experience when she posted a flash sheet of Twilight-inspired designs to her Instagram. A frequent re-viewer who sometimes plays Twilight drinking games with friends, Baillargeon made the sheet after those same friends mentioned wanting tattoos inspired by the film.
“It took me a while to actually create it, because I didn’t know how many people would actually be down to get them,” she says. “I thought it would be more of a funny thing to put on social media, but it’s had a lot of success, and now it’s probably one of my most viewed posts ever.”
A number of customers have even booked sessions with Baillargeon to get tattoos from the sheet and joked that they’d love it if she could add a “Team Charlie” option to her “Team Edward” and “Team Jacob” designs in tribute to Bella’s dad in the series.
Things are also picking up in Forks, Washington, where the Twilight series is set. (The movies, notably, were filmed elsewhere, mostly in Oregon and British Columbia.) Lissy Andros, the executive director of the Forks Chamber of Commerce, says that her town has been wild with Twihards since 2020, thanks in part to TikTok and the Twilight Renaissance.
“In 2022 we had the biggest year, tourism-wise, that we’ve had since 2010, and we’ve already beat out those numbers as of this September,” she says. “Probably 65 percent of visitors to Forks come because of Twilight. It’s the essence and feel of the series that makes them love this area, and they feel like it’s kind of the hometown they never had.”
The town draws about 2,000 visitors every year just for Forever Twilight in Forks, which takes place over four days in September, and Andros says that, since 2017, more than 77,000 people have gone through the town’s collection of props and costumes from the series, even though it’s “only open four hours a day in the summer and eight hours a week in the winter.”
Shandra Mutchie, a cosplayer who portrays Michael Sheen’s Aro character from the series at the Forever Twilight in Forks event, estimates that a good portion of the attendees at this year’s festival were new, younger people who had never attended before, many of whom she says credit Twilight for playing an “integral part in their development into an adult.”
“Twilight is special, and it wasn’t just lightning in a bottle,” Mutchie says. “It persists.”
