The soft-spoken Jasper Cullen (or Hale) may be one of the Cullen clan’s quietest , but he has one of the most gruesome canon backstories of any Cam Gigandet as the campy villain James, the first film in the series told the story of Edward Cullen, a moody vampire, and his infatuation with human teenager Bella.
Despite receiving consistent brutal reviews from critics, the Twilight saga was a hit with its intended audience of teenage girls and even won over some older fans with its streak of self-aware humor. As the Twilight movies continued the saga, the lore of the series grew more complex and the truncated runtime of the Twilight adaptations meant that many major elements of the series were elided or compressed. As is often the case with book-to-movie adaptations, some of these changes left fans dismayed.
Like the Harry Potter series before it, the Twilight movies struggled to keep fans happy while also keeping runtimes reasonable and a handful of key moments were missing from each book’s movie adaptation. This was a particularly prevalent problem for new director Chris Weitz, who won over few fans when Eclipse was considered by many to be the strongest standalone movie in the saga, thanks in no small part to the intriguing backstory that the adaptation provided for Jasper Cullen. Until then a minor character, in Eclipse Jasper was granted a lengthy, gruesome flashback which delved into a tale of deception, betrayal, anguish, and not a little blood in its dark story set over a hundred years before the action of Twilight.
Jasper Was a Confederate Soldier
It’s clear from the start of Jasper’s lengthy tale he tells Bella that, like his adopted sister Rosalie Cullen, the character had a pretty brutal backstory. Even before becoming a vampire, Jasper was enlisted on the wrong side of the US civil war, and his time spent in service isn’t exactly glamorized in the brief glimpses Eclipse offers of the conflict. There, Jasper sees endless death and destruction which takes a sizeable mental toll, with the skillful soldier eventually ferrying refugees from affected areas when constant combat becomes too intense to bear. However, the horrors of war don’t come to a close to the start of Jasper’s torment when he comes across a coven of vampires while transporting refugees.
Jasper’s Vampire Transformation
In a scene worthy of the campy violent vampire drama Romanian coven or the Volturi, but judging by the lore of Twilight Marcus, Are, and co should be in power in Europe at this stage. Not that it matters much to Jasper, though. The sensitive character soon finds the process of turning humans into vampires, only to often kill them, leaves him dead inside. That's what leads to Jasper’s eventual escape from his creator’s clutches.
Jasper’s Happy Ending
After this grim ordeal, it’s reasonable to question whether the Twilight saga could hope to grant Jasper anything like a happy ending. However, as Rosalie’s backstory and the surprisingly bloodless climax of Breaking Dawn Part 2 both prove, the series is consistently able to offer hope at the tail end of even the darkest tales. Eventually coming across Ashley Greene’s empathetic Alice after absconding from his creator and her vampire army, Jasper is told about the Cullen clan. Edward’s chosen family, the Cullens, are a brood of vampires who live in harmony with humans and feed on animal blood, an option which apparently hadn’t occurred to Jasper in his years of brooding over killing humans for sustenance.
Alice convinces Jasper to seek out the Cullens with her and he falls for her before they meet the family, becoming her mate for life (or undeath, as it were). Soon after starting a new, less hopeless life with Alice, Jasper and his mate encounter the Cullens and he learns that the misery he felt while killing came from his ability to share a psychic link with others, something he had even before becoming a vampire. With the clan’s help, he stops feeding on humans and hones his empathetic abilities, which come in handy later in the Twilight series.
How Jasper’s Backstory Affects Twilight
As proven by the presence of Breaking Dawn Part 2 because Jasper’s backstory has been well-established in Eclipse.
Slade’s economic visual storytelling ensures that Jasper’s backstory makes for a memorable addition to the Twilight saga without overwhelming proceedings the way Rosalie’s bleak origins do in the same film, and the western-meets-horror story is another of the director's surprisingly dark and intense addition to what is otherwise a largely light-hearted franchise.
