Ashley Greene’s quirky Alice in the Twilight series has a dark backstory — one that involves the original movie’s main villain, James.
As with every member of the troubled Cullen family, Ashley Greene’s quirky vampire Alice has a dark Twilight backstory. Starting with Catherine Hardwicke’s moody Twilight in 2008, the Twilight saga was an uneven set of movie adaptations that brought Stephenie Meyers’ popular paranormal romance saga of the same name to the big screen.
While the Twilight movie adaptations were disowned by some of their cast and derided by critics, the movies did huge business at the box office and were beloved by their target demographic, fans of the original novels. Although the tone of the series shifts dramatically between Hardwicke’s self-serious original, the more light-hearted follow-up New Moon, and the action-oriented threequel from 30 Days of Night director David Slade, Eclipse, one thing that all the Twilight movies had in common was a struggle to compress the lengthy source novels into movies that arrived in the cineplex with reasonable runtimes.
As a result, a lot of fan-favorite moments were cut from the Twilight movie adaptations due to their limited runtimes, with the last novel Breaking Dawn being split into two movies to ensure fans weren’t disappointed (a tactic later used by the Harry Potter series and Hobbit adaptations, with mixed results). Much of the Twilight content that fans missed out on, while fun, was largely irrelevant to the main story of the saga: the seemingly doomed romance between teen vampire Edward Cullen and small-town girl Bella Swan. However, some of the background lore removed from the Twilight movies actually formed an important bit of foreshadowing for the story’s later twists, and, as such, it’s a shame viewers didn’t get a chance to see these story details. For example, take Alice Cullen’s backstory: Like most of Twilight’s first family, Alice has a dark backstory that the Twilight movie adaptations don’t have the time to adapt to the screen, but unlike the rest of the Cullen clan, shes actually ties into the action of the first film in the series.
Alice’s Childhood
Before becoming a vampire in her late teens, Alice was simply a small-town girl who had a gift for predicting the future. In early childhood, this seemingly harmless gift manifested in minor, possibly coincidental predictions, such as knowing the weather would be bad well before it turned. However, as Alice grew her powers grew with her, and by the time she reached her late teens, the gift of foresight meant she was cursed with foreboding visions of her mother’s impending death at the hands of a mysterious man. Alice began demanding that her mother stay home for her own safety, something that her loving mother indulged at first.
However, in another example of the Twilight franchise’s many terrible father figures (shout out to Alice’s eventual adopted father Carlisle Cullen, who suffered the same keep struggle), Alice’s amoral dad insists that his wife ignore his daughter’s doomsaying and demands that Alice her visions to herself or be branded insane. Unfortunately for Alice, many of her small-town neighbors and classmates also reacted poorly to her predictions, causing them to shun her and strengthen her father’s threat. Despite Alice’s mother doing her best to heed her daughter’s advice, she eventually was driven off the road by a stranger, a tragedy whose sudden and unexpected occurrence did nothing to deter Alice’s father from remarrying almost immediately.
Alice’s Visions of the Future
Unfortunately for Alice, the visions of her mother’s death didn’t end after her mother’s funeral. In a plot that is surprisingly similar to Gothika, an underrated Halle Berry psychological horror, Alice Cullen eventually had a vision not only of an assassin ensuring that her mother was dead after the accident but also of her father paying the unseen stranger to kill her mother . Naturally, the aggrieved Alice attempted to warn her relatives, but her father beat her to their home and had the teen institutionalized so he could hold onto his dark secret. Undergoing traumatic electroshock therapy, Alice lost her memories of her dark early life and gained the happy-go-lucky demeanor she has throughout the Twilight series, immortalized in the movie adaptations by Ashley Greene’s quirky take on the part.
Twilight’s Villain James
In the asylum, Alice was befriended by a benevolent vampire who took her under his wing and nurtured her talent for foresight. But things wouldn’t stay stable for long, as this was the point of her backstory where Alice’s tale intersects with that of Twilight’s heroine, Bella Swan. The inmate soon starts to see visions of Twilight’s villain James hunting her and her mentor down, and her vampire mentor was smart enough to take her at her word as he was aware her foresight wouldn’t lie.
