Fandango reports advance movie theater sellouts and fans pack malls to get a glimpse of an actor who's only appeared in two other movies (both part of the "Harry Potter" franchise). At Comic-Con International this summer in San Diego, the reaction to the young stars, including Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson, was rock-star hysteria.

Before anyone had seen the film, there was no doubt "Twilight" was going to be big -- possibly the movie that propels the fall movie season to blockbuster or bust.

The teen human/vampire romance is based on a widely popular book that has had an Internet afterlife, with dozens of sites for girls (and "Twilight" moms, too) who can't get enough of author Stephenie Meyer's characters.

No doubt, the allure of vampires and their seductive onscreen history is one reason. The other may be that underserved teenage girls finally have a movie to call their own.

We already know the appeal of star-crossed lovers, and the sex appeal of vampires is undeniable. When Ann Rice's megaselling "Interview With a Vampire" made it to the big screen in 1994, Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise led the cast. Frank Langella, in the late 1970s Broadway "Dracula" that inspired the movie, seduced audiences with a big pre-intermission bite that propelled him to the big screen as the title character. The film had little to do with the play -- except for the sexy vampire.

Why are we so easily seduced by the fanged ones?

"Obviously the act of feeding is a very blatant sexual metaphor," Alan Ball, the creator of HBO's vampire series, "True Blood," told starpulse.com.

"You know how a lot of people are attracted to the bad boy or the femme fatale? The hot, sexy, dangerous person you know is really not good for you? Your conscious mind is going, 'OK, move away, walk away from this.' ... The one you should want and know you should want, they don't turn you on as much."

Edi Gathegi, who plays the vampire Laurent in "Twilight," made a list of why vampires are sexy for reporters at Comic-Con: "Immortality, super strength, super speed. In the book they're described as -- I wouldn't be so pretentious to say that I am that -- but they're gorgeous, they're beautiful. That's just kinda like every guy wants to have that kind of speed and strength and seduce women with their eyes."

Then there's the "Sex and the City" syndrome. Movies for teen girls are often MIA these days, so when one like "Twilight" comes along, they're ready to rush in -- just as women flocked to "Sex" when a movie was made with them in mind. The romance without pressure for sex and unpretentious heroine of "Twilight" appear to be a draw for girls the way teenage boys are attracted to raunchy guy flicks, like "Superbad."

Horrormeister Stephen King wrote an essay about chick lit vs. manfiction for Entertainment Weekly, in which he wrote: "What men want from an Elmore Leonard novel is exactly what women want from a Nora Roberts novel -- escape and entertainment. And while it's true that manfiction can be guilty of objectifying women, chick lit often does the same thing to men."

He says this isn't necessarily a bad thing. "Women like stories in which a gal meets a handsome [and possibly dangerous] hunk on a tropic isle; men like to imagine going to war against an army of bad guys with a Beretta, a blowtorch, and a submachine gun."