A pale and emaciated woman lies dead on a stretcher, abdomen split open, surrounded by sheets soaked in blood (see Fig. 2.1). A vampire plunges a large syringe filled with his venom directly into her heart and then proceeds to apply cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), encouraging blood to flow through her arteries and veins, thus spreading his venom throughout the body. The scene cuts from a series of close-ups of the woman's open dead eyes and the vampire's blood-soaked hands as he continues to apply pressure to her heart, to an overhead shot of the body on an operating table surrounded by surgical trolleys and medical equipment all bathed in harsh overhead lighting. Later as the vampire continues to encourage her transformation by injecting her with more venom through small bites on each of her limbs, the sequence moves from the overhead shot to a closeup of the woman's face, via a series of jump cuts, before plunging beneath the skin through her nasal cavity and into her blood stream, conveyed through computer-generated imagery often referred to as the CSI shot, in which a virtual camera penetrates beneath the skin to explore the inner workings of the body (Hamit 2002: 101). Here the virtual camera follows the spread of the venom through her blood and into her heart, seemingly crystalising and hardening the inner structures of her body. These images are accompanied by a sound montage of the woman's screams. This is the beginning of Bella Swan's long-awaited transformation into a vampire that concludes the first part of the final instalment in the Twilight Saga, Breaking Dawn Part 1 (2011).

Despite the series’ romantic preoccupations, this sequence has replaced the eroticism of John Badham's Dracula (1979) and the romanticism of Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992) – characteristics often associated with vampire seduction – with the brutality of a painful transformation, while the tantalising bite of the vampire has been substituted by the efficiency of a syringe to the heart. The vampire has become the subject of the medical gaze, in which, according to Michel Foucault, ‘the medical eye must see the illness spread before it, horizontally and vertically in graded depth, as it penetrates into a body, as it advances into its bulk, as it circumvents or lifts its masses, as it descends into its depths’ (Foucault 1993: 136).