Vampires ruled the weekend as the movie "Twilight" grossed $70.5 million to earn top honors at the box office Friday through Sunday.

Catherine Hardwicke's film also enjoyed the biggest opening ever for a female director, blowing away the previous standard of $41.1 million set by Mimi Leder's "Deep Impact" in 1998.

This latest vampire incarnation, a figment of novelist Stephenie Meyer's imagination, illustrates how much the fanged heroes have evolved since readers first fell for Bram Stoker's delectably frightening "Dracula" in the late 19th century.

Drawing from a huge fan base of teenage girls, who devoured Meyer's tale of forbidden love between brooding Edward Cullen and bookish high-schooler Bella Swan, "Twilight" made a whopping $20,636 per theater, according to Sunday morning estimates.

And the fan girls will get another taste soon enough: Summit Entertainment, which released "Twilight," announced during the weekend that it's going ahead with production of "New Moon," based on the second book in Meyer's international best-selling series.

Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart will return as its star-crossed lovers, but whether Hardwicke will be at the helm again is still being determined.

In Pattinson's Cullen, movie- goers will see the continuing evolution of vampires from pure monsters to complex, conflicted and sophisticated men.

"Vampires ... are very resilient and meet different needs of different cultures," said Nina Auerbach, an English professor at the University of Pennsylvania and author of "Our Vampire, Ourselves" (University of Chicago Press, $12, 240 pages).

That observation rang true for Jason Gieger, an associate film and English professor at California State University, Sacramento. In the 1960s and 1970s, he noted, Bela Lugosi's coffin-rising monster gave way to a sympathetic figure who faced an enduring, horrible fate.

The civil rights movement had a lot to do with a change in perception of these creatures, Gieger says.

"You got a new perspective that was previously not included and the vampire hunters who were trying to bring order to the world were looked at with some suspicion," Gieger says.

In the 1980s and 1990s, as the world came to grips with the scary revelation of the AIDS epidemic, Auerbach says, big-screen vampires suddenly gained a desire to reverse their metamorphosis and return to the world humans know.

Another literary scholar, who has read the "Twilight" saga with her twin daughters, says that Meyer, a Mormon, is making a case for abstinence in modern society.

"Not only is Bella saying no, but Edward and his entire family are saying no to their deepest instinct. It's a series about abstaining from the strongest desires and finding compensation," says Margaret Ferguson, chair and professor of English at the University of California, Davis.

"Since the AIDS epidemic, children have had to think in adult sorts of ways about the risk of giving in to very strong desires," she says.

Ferguson and her 11-year-old daughters will enjoy the ageless vampire tale soon at a theater, after having bonded over the books.

By the thousands, Sacramento residents lined up to get into "Twilight," and many of them had also done a bit of literary analysis.

Says Glennielyn Pacheco, who read Meyer's series last summer: "Sometimes love isn't accepted from outsiders, and sometimes you've just got to follow your heart. And they did and were happy."

"Dating a vampire is just hot," says Andrea Lopez, 31. "Vampires have always been a mystical folklore that appeals to the sexual side of fantasy."

Call The Bee's Gamaliel Ortiz, (916) 321-1022. The Associated Press contributed to this report.