US teenagers are bitten by vampire bug

In an outbreak of pop hysteria being described as "Beatlemania with fangs," millions of teenagers will descend on America's cinemas this weekend for the launch of what Hollywood expects to become the hottest new film franchise since Harry Potter.

The opening of Twilight, a vampire love story adapted from a series of best-selling novels by Stephenie Meyer, has brought large crowds to the country's streets, shopping malls and bookstores, and is on course to set box-office records.

More than 500 special screenings scheduled for one minute past midnight yesterday morning – the earliest time cinemas could legally show the film – were sold out.

Analysts now expect Twilight to take $70m (£47m) in a blockbuster opening weekend that will turn it into the biggest new release since The Dark Knight, creating one of the most successful series of teenage films of all time.

Its cult status, which was originally achieved through word-of-mouth, has put young stars Kirsten Stewart and Robert Pattinson – a Londoner best-known for playing Cedric Diggory in some of the Harry Potter films – on the cover of Entertainment Weekly and almost every supermarket tabloid in the country. Hundreds of internet forums devoted to the phenomenon have brought noisy crowds of mainly female fans to recent publicity events.

In San Francisco last week, police cancelled an autograph signing at the Stonestown Galleria shopping mall after 3,000 youths arrived early and caused a near-riot. And fans have even been showing-up in Forks, the remote timber town in Washington State where the books are set, turning local landmarks into minor tourist attractions.

The Twilight Saga, as the Stephenie Meyer books are known, follow a high-school romance between local vampire Edward Cullen, and his human girlfriend Bella Swan, who moves to Forks to live with her father. Over the course of 2,000 pages, they fall in and out of love as Edward fights a long-running battle against the urge to turn Bella into dinner. The books have already sold more than 17 million copies worldwide.

Huge quantities of mostly adolescent fans have been turning up to screenings in fancy dress, mimicking the film's protagonists by wearing black lipstick and white powder on their faces.

In the queue outside the Mann Theatre in downtown Santa Monica, Los Angeles shortly before midnight on Thursday, Olivia Barone and Ishmael Roos, both 14, wore their skinniest jeans and had scrawled the word "Twilight" across their faces in black marker pen. They were celebrating having secured tickets to the midnight screening: "Anyone who isn't here is going to get told all about it tomorrow, which will make them feel like total geeks, and just ruin the film when they do see it," explained Ms Barone.

A similar level of excitement is expected to hit the UK this week when the film has its Leicester Square premiere on 3 December.

For several key players in the film industry, the success of Twilight, made for a relatively modest $38m, is causing serious soul searching. It was turned down by executives at MTV films, Fox, and Paramount Pictures. Given that at least three sequels will now follow Twilight, the franchise is likely to generate in excess of $1bn for Summit Entertainment, a little-known independent production company which picked-up the rights for a relative song.