Maybe the “Twilight” franchise was just feeling a little emasculated. Can you blame it? Last year, when someone asked hunky “True Blood” star Alexander Skarsgard what he thought of Edward Cullen and Co., he laughed it off: “They’re cute,” he said.
But no more! Enter British director David Slade, whose last two films have been anything but cuddly. Surely the guy who made audiences literally squirm as Ellen Page tortured Patrick Wilson in “Hard Candy” could bring a little blood back to the vampires of Forks, Washington.
In “The Twilight Saga: Eclipse,” the series’ third installment, that’s what he set out to do.
“One of my goals . . . was to make Edward scary,” Slade told IGN. “Because he’s a vampire. And there’s a carnivore under that surface.”
Not that you’d know it from the first two movies, which made Edward (Robert Pattinson) look like a bit of a powder puff. At his angriest, you’d find him looking really menacingly at a group of thugs, throwing a hissy fit when his girl talks to her teen-wolf friend or getting tossed around like a rag doll by some Italian vampires.
In most vamp mythology, they burst into flames in the sunlight. Not Edward — he sparkles.
Even the menacing wolf-boys of “New Moon,” led by newly ripped Taylor Lautner, seem to have mainly existed to show off their six-packs, in human form, and CGI technology, in wolf form.
If the boyfriends of swooning female fans were ever going to be persuaded to show up for yet another dose of Edward and Bella, sitting in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g, the action would have to be ramped up. Things would actually have to get bloody.
“This book, of all the books, is the darkest,” says screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg, who predicts male viewers will dig the many fight scenes — wolf vs. vampire, old vampire vs. new vampire, Rosalie vs. a throng of Victorian gentlemen — depicted throughout. “It’s conflict [men] respond to and there’s just a great deal more of them in this one.”
“Eclipse” picks up where “New Moon” left off. Edward has just proposed to Bella. Bella’s best friend Jacob is coping with his feelings for her and his newfound wolf-ness. Vengeful vamp Victoria is still out there somewhere, forming an army of new vampires. And the Volturi clan is waiting for Bella to be turned into a vampire herself.
Unlike “New Moon,” which revolved in large part around Edward’s absence and Bella’s resulting depression, “Eclipse” jumps straight into action. “I think people will be quite shocked at the quicker pace,” says Pattinson. “I think the tone is a lot harsher. The fight scenes are much more scrappy and feral.”
It’s all “a little grittier, a little more raw” than the last movie, confirms Rosenberg, who says Slade’s gift for horror was a perfect match for the series’ new direction. “ ‘New Moon’ was a sweeping epic, and that would not have been correct for this movie. This screenplay called for something a little darker, and I think David is the man for that.”
“Eclipse” is part of this summer’s vampire zeitgeist, in which formerly passive bloodsuckers are suddenly turning macho, even grotesque. This season’s blockbuster novel “The Passage” also revolves around vamps, but author Justin Cronin hardly writes the stuff of tween girls’ dreams: “His hairless body, smooth and shiny as glass, looked coiled . . . and his eyes were the orange of traffic cones. But his teeth were the worst . . . long as the little swords you’d get in a fancy drink . . . and always chatting away, that weird sound they made, a wet clicking from deep in their throats.”
Meanwhile, on “True Blood,” a horror aesthetic has been increasingly evident. So far this season, we’ve seen one vampire biting a guy’s ear off, another sleeping in a basement next to a rotting corpse and a dinner party during which one of the hosts excuses himself to “drain the second course.”
Slade’s amped-up take on the genre should fit right in. But the director of the Alaskan-set vampire thriller “30 Days of Night” wasn’t always a “Twilight” fan. Long before he signed up for “Eclipse,” back when the first movie came out, he described a night out with pals.
“Yesterday we were trying to find a movie to see and we’d seen all the good ones, you know, and there was nothing really coming out this weekend that we really fancied at all,” he told a radio show. “We really weren’t interested in seeing ‘Twilight,’ but a lot of people said let’s go. ‘Twilight’ drunk? No, not even drunk. ‘Twilight’ on acid? No, not even on acid? ‘Twilight’ at gun point? Just shoot me.”
AWK-ward!
Later, Slade swore in an online statement that he’d been, you know, just kidding.
“When I made these comments, I had neither seen the film nor read the books. I was promoting a comedy short film that I had made for Xbox and every pop-culture subject was seen as a possible comedy target. Of course, I have since seen the movie and read the books and was quickly consumed with the rich storytelling and the beautifully honest characters that Stephenie Meyer created.”
In a way, though, Slade’s initial aversion to the wimpy Meyer vamps bodes well for the franchise. Despite middling reviews, the one thing “30 Days” did well was make vampires genuinely horrifying — dead-eyed, speaking their own language and prone to ripping little kids’ throats out.
It’s doubtful we’ll see Edward Cullen snacking on innocent children anytime soon, but finally Twihards will get a movie with a little more bite.
Movie’s new Victorian age
Bryce Dallas Howard is in a pickle. She just landed a plum role in one of her favorite movie franchises, as Victoria, a crimson-haired vampire set on tormenting Edward and Bella. But her good fortune comes at the cost of Rachelle Lefevre, who played the part in the first two “Twilight” movies. Because of a dispute over scheduling, the studio, Summit, replaced Lefevre with Howard at the last minute before “Eclipse” began shooting.
“It’s a really disappointing circumstance, not ideal at all,” Howard says. “Part of the joy of franchises is you get to see the continuity of the same actors playing the roles. Like in ‘Harry Potter.’ ”
And Howard turns out to have been a die-hard Twihard long before Summit ever came calling.
“I’m just genuinely geeking out,” she says. “I was at a convention the other day, and this woman had this awesome ‘Eclipse’ shirt, and I wanted to buy it from her. I definitely have ‘Twilight’ paraphernalia around my house.”
She saw the movies so many times that it drove her friends nuts.
“My friends were always making fun of me,” says the 29-year-old daughter of director Ron Howard. Even when she worked on an ensemble comedy script, she couldn’t resist bringing it up. “I’d be like, ‘You know, it’s just like that feeling when you see Edward Cullen for the first time.’ ”
Her writing partner “got to the point where he made these Post-it Notes with Rob’s face on them that said, ‘Live dangerously.’ He meant it as a joke, but I was like, ‘This is the best gift I’ve ever received.’ ”
sara.stewart@nypost.com