FORKS — After 10 years, Twilight is still bright in Forks.
With a newly rebranded Stephenie Meyer Day Twilight festival, a new logo and new management for the festival, the Forks Chamber of Commerce seeks sponsors for the 10th anniversary of the release of Meyer’s first of the Twilight series of novels.
The September festival will now be known as Forever Twilight in Forks, said Lissy Andros, chamber executive director and chairwoman of the festival committee.
“It honors Stephenie and all things Twilight,” Andros told those at a chamber luncheon last week.
Since 2010, Stephenie Meyer Day events have been run by various organizations, individuals and businesses, but the chamber agreed to take over the four-day event this year, Andros said.
“We will try to make it bigger and better,” she said.
Meyer, who lives in Arizona and owns a home on Marrowstone Island, attended the 2013 festival, and plans are being made to accommodate a visit if Meyer decides to attend this year, Andros said.
The four-day celebration will begin Sept. 10 with check-in and continue through Sept. 13 — which is the fictional protagonist Bella Swan’s birthday.
A four-day “Weekend Escape Package” ticket will offer entry to all events, includes extra “goodies” and offers early entry for a few special events.
The package ticket is available for $150 until June 1 and can be purchased in Forks’ online store at www.forkswa.com/online-store.
Ticket prices will increase after June 1, Andros said.
Andros formally introduced the new logo for the celebration, which uses lowercase letters in red and black in the same font as the original book cover with a red apple, commonly a symbol associated with the novel series.
“We are the Forks of the books,” Andros said.
The books take place in the Forks area, with scenes in Port Angeles, but the movie was filmed elsewhere, she said.
Andros said she is seeking sponsors to cover the initial expense of the festival and to pay for professional performers to attend, including guest actors from the movies and cosplayers to take on the role of vampires and werewolves.
Sponsor names will be printed on the back of the festival’s official shirt.
There are several Forks-area sponsors already and a few Port Angeles sponsors whose businesses appear in the book.
“Twilight is a story that is loved by millions,” Andros said.
The original novel by Stephenie Meyer was released Oct. 5, 2005, and by the end of November of that year, the book was No. 5 on The New York Times’ best-seller list.
It featured the story of Bella, 17, who moved from Arizona to Forks to live with her father, Police Chief Charlie Swan.
The book was followed by New Moon, Eclipse and Breaking Dawn.
In the series of novels, Bella falls in love with two men — a 100-year-old vampire, Edward Cullen, and a teenage Quileute werewolf, Jacob Black — and must choose between the very different lives they offer, then has to fight for her choice and her life.
Eventually, the story was made into a series of movies released from 2008 through 2012.
In 2006, fans of the books began trickling in to the Forks Visitor Center and asked questions about the sites in the book.
Visitor center staff quickly read the book and worked to prepare for the flood that was to come.
Ten years and 340,000 visitors later, Forks still embraces the Twilight phenomenon.
The year 2004 and 2005 had been low in the number of visitors who stopped in the visitor center, with only 5,195 and 5,575 arriving to get information about the area, down from the 15,849 who signed their names in the visitor center’s guest book in 1997.
In 2007, that number jumped to 10,295, then to 72,000 visitors in 2010, after the release of the first movie.
The visitor center offered Twilight book location maps, cutouts of the characters and added two antique red pickup trucks, one to match Bella’s 1953 Chevrolet truck from the books and the other a duplicate of the 1963 Chevrolet stepside truck used in the movie.
In 2014, the number of visitors had declined to 33,512 — still more than double the number of visitors seen during the best of the pre-Twilight years.
Many of those Twilight visitors have been coming from around the world, since the books have been translated into other languages, Andros said.
She has said that visitor counts at the center may underestimate the number of visitors because many return visitors do not sign in at the visitor center.
Many visitors who came for Twilight the first time have developed favorites in Forks — selecting the hotels or inns they stay in, the restaurants where they eat and often head directly to the places they already know and love, she said.
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Reporter Arwyn Rice can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5070, or at arice@peninsuladailynews.com.
