When people think of the first Twilight movie, their minds inevitably drift not to an action sequence or special-effects-driven set piece, but to the baseball scene. That’s where we learn that vampires can only engage in America’s favorite pastime during a heavy storm, because their super-speed and strength capabilities can only be sheathed beneath thunder and lightning. The two-and-a-half minute scene relies on a moody blue filter, some in-camera slo-mo, and Muse’s “Supermassive Black Hole.” In between takes, the cast say they speculated about the production’s fate. “We were like, ‘Man, I wonder if anybody’s going to see this film,’” Peter Facinelli, who played coven patriarch Carlisle Cullen, has previously said. “We were doing this little vampire movie in the woods.”

Based on Stephanie Meyers’s best-selling novel, the film premiered in November 2008 to $69 million in its opening weekend, eventually grossing more than $400 million worldwide. It was a box office hit for indie studio Summit Entertainment and spawned four more films based on Meyers’s books—2009’s New Moon, 2010’s Eclipse, 2011’s Breaking Dawn–Part 1, and 2012’s Breaking Dawn–Part 2. The franchise generated more than $3 billion total and spawned other YA franchises like The Hunger Games and Divergent, as well as the Fifty Shades franchise, which was based on Twilight fan fiction.

The series was unavoidably popular, but also easy to poke fun at. Because it was created by and for women, the plot was often reduced to the love triangle between Kristen Stewart’s mortal Bella, Robert Pattinson’s vampire Edward, and Taylor Lautner’s werewolf Jacob. Movie marketing fueled by the Team Edward versus Team Jacob debate didn’t help matters. Fifteen years before the pop cultural dominance and subsequent respect earned by ventures like Barbie or Taylor Swift’s Eras tour, even valid criticism of Twilight was drowned out by the prevailing notion that art targeted towards a predominantly female audience should be stigmatized.

Tides started to turn in 2020 with the publication of a new Twilight book from Meyer, a Netflix streaming deal for the original films, and a global pandemic that had the world indoors and eager to escape. The rise of TikTok, where the Twilight hashtag has upwards of 28 billion views, gave way to nostalgic trends about the movies. Those who once felt shame about their fandom could reclaim the movies, and those who weren’t old enough to experience the initial fervor were exposed to Twilight secondhand. Take this comment under a clip of the movie’s baseball scene on YouTube: “POV: you saw a TikTok recreation and came to check how accurate it was.”

Evidence of Twilight’s endurance is plentiful. Fans are flocking to Forks, Washington (where the series takes place) in record numbers. “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,” Lissy Andros, the executive director of the Forks Chamber of Commerce, recently told Wired. “Probably 65% of visitors to Forks come because of Twilight.”

The series was referenced in the announcement of Olivia Rodrigo’s hit single “vampire,” discussed (albeit disparagingly) by Travis and Jason Kelce on their New Heights podcast, nodded towards in Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn, and was the subject of a viral meme from actor Tituss Burgess. “I still can’t get over Jacob imprinting on that baby in Twilight,” he said in a recent TikTok live filmed during the intermission at Broadway’s Moulin Rouge! “They could’ve found another way. It didn’t feel right when I saw it and it don’t feel right now.” Oh, and there’s a Twilight TV series on the way.

Although all of the films get their fair share of references, the first Twilight is by far the most memed. Blame it on lines like this one: “Hold on tight, spider monkey,” which Edward says to Bella as he soars through the trees with her on his back. That line wasn’t even in the book. Given how much money and power it would amass, it’s easy to forget just how weird the first Twilight movie is—made just strangely and small enough to permeate through pop culture in a way the other movies simply haven’t. It’s a blockbuster with the trajectory of a misunderstood cult classic.

The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes star Tom Blyth recently told me that filming the $100 million prequel felt akin to making an indie movie. But Twilight could actually be classified as one. It was made for just $37 million, a far cry from the series’ final installment, which came with a price tag of over $120 million. Director Catherine Hardwicke told Vanity Fair in 2018 that she was even forced “to find a way to cut $4 million out of the budget” four days before production began.

Twilight was not predestined to be a hit—and as such, the filmmakers had a level of creative freedom not afforded in the later films. “Nobody knew what it was going to be, what it was. I didn’t have committees giving me notes; I wasn’t watched by big-time producers. I didn’t have the pressure of hitting blockbuster marks,” Hardwicke told The Hollywood Reporter in 2018. “We didn’t even have a test screening, so it was really made like an indie film.”

Other actors have echoed this sentiment. Jackson Rathbone, who played Jasper (the less said about his pre-blood-sucking backstory, the better), told Entertainment Weekly that he and Pattinson could even play open mics at a local Portland bar while filming, staying undetected by the eventual hordes of Twihards. The first film “was just like summer camp,” Facinelli agreed. “And then by the fifth one, it was hard to even see each other.”

With each ensuing film, the Twilight saga veered further from Hardwicke’s off-kilter vision, ballooning budgets giving way to CGI werewolves and infants, plus an utterly ludicrous bait-and-switch in the final film’s battle scene. When asked to deliver the second installment, New Moon, in less than a year, Hardwicke declined to return as director. Only men were hired to helm the following films. “There’s lots of projects like that,” Hardwicke previously told VF. “It goes on and on. They’re stories written by women, about women, and given to male directors. Over and over and over.” (The first Fifty Shades was similarly directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson before being handed off to men for the next two installments.) One of the only consistent elements of the Twilight series are its needle drops, in large part because Grey’s Anatomy music supervisor Alexandra Patsavas was retained for all five movies.

After the franchise concluded in 2012, Pattinson and Stewart retreated back into their indie spheres, with a few Caped Crusader and People’s Princess–sized exceptions. And both have maintained that the original Twilight lived in that space too. “It was kind of an oddball, slightly marginal teen movie,” Stewart told SirusXM last year. “I didn’t think everyone was going to take to that—I didn’t think we were going to make a sequel.” In 2020, Pattinson explained to the BBC, “No one realized that Twilight was an arthouse movie.”

In the final scene of Twilight’s first installment, Bella pleads with Edward to change her into a vampire—at her prom, of all places. He slowly leans into her neck, before placing a gentle kiss in the spot where a venom-filled bite mark would go. “Is it not enough just to have a long and happy life with me?” Edward asks. “Yeah—for now,” she replies, a suggestion of the mystical world-building to come. But 15 years later, it feels like fans sided with Edward–content to sway beneath the lit-up gazebo to a mid-2000s alternative song, mismatched and star-crossed for just a little longer.