They sucked the life blood right out.
A small Washington town has seen its tourism numbers rise from the dead, thanks to being the setting of the “Twilight” novels turned film series with Robert Pattinson and Kirsten Stewart — and residents are still fed up nearly 20 years later.
Locals in the town of Forks are stocking up on proverbial garlic to ward off the unwelcome newcomers that have emerged in the tens of thousands.
Last year saw 66,000 tourists compared to 2005’s 5,000 — the year Stephanie Meyer’s first hit book took shelves, according to the Times of London.
“You do get some odd characters roaming around,” Forks local Leslie Graham, 44, said.
In addition to seeing folks with sharpened teeth ready to sink them into a nosh from Sully’s Drive-In, “the local hardware store sells out of flashlights all the time, as people buy them to go hunting vampires in the woods,” she added.
“I’m like, honey, that’s fiction. And if it wasn’t, they’d kill you.”
Folks who live far from the center of town, like Dora Maxfield, 53, said, “We see people roaming around there it’s kind of eerie.”
“I work at the local school — which the Twilight characters ‘went to’ — and they’d be out there, crying about how much they loved this vampire guy,” Maxfield said.
“Sometimes they’d try and walk into the school. It’s not safe for the kids.”
Not all superfans are baying at the moon, however. Lissy Andros was such a fan of “Twilight” that she abandoned East Texas to start anew in Forks years ago. She’s now their chamber of commerce’s executive director.
“The books have been an incredible blessing for the town,” she said admitting that not everyone finds them to be fang-tastic.
“There are absolutely people in town who don’t support this, or the tourism…There’s a misguided view that the town would thrive without it. But we are very fortunate to have this gift.”
Ask a fourth-generation local like Graham, and she will say a lot of the vampire publicity does suck.
“I’m not against progress, and not against tourism,” she said. “But it does make me annoyed that the streets are clogged with cars. My kids will never know the quiet little town I grew up in.”
