Back in 2008, director David Slade, the rising star behind the edgy horror-thrillers Hard Candy and 30 Days of Night, made some casually disparaging remarks about his lack of enthusiasm for the first Twilight film, which was proving a huge hit with teenage girls. "Twilight drunk? No not even drunk," he joked on a US radio station when it was suggested that he should check out the "repressed hormone teen vampire" movie that he had previously mocked on Twitter. "Twilight at gunpoint? Just shoot me…"

Fast-forward a few months and Slade would be found eating his words ("I think I've eaten more than enough humble pie," he told me later), stating that those comments were made before he'd ever read Stephenie Meyer's novels about a young woman whose affections are divided between a vampire and a werewolf, or seen the blockbusting movies, all of which turned out to be far more interesting, intelligent and inspiring than he had ever imagined. While cynics dismissed this retraction as a contractual mea culpa by Slade, who had just signed on to direct the third Twilight film, Eclipse, it has about it the ring of truth. For the fact is that the world is full of people (many of them middle-aged men) who feel not just enabled but dutybound to be sniffy about Twilight without having seen the films, read the books, or attempted to understand why they mean so much to so many.

The collective critical moo-ing that greets the arrival of each new screen instalment of the Twilight series says more about how out of touch the film-reviewing fraternity is with a certain section of the movie-going audience than it does about the films themselves. The sight of stuffy, bespectacled greying men berating films aimed primarily at teenage girls is as farcical as it is depressing. In a Guardian blog last year, critic and writer Anne Billson correctly noted that "Twilight attracts a lot more vitriol than any other nonsense aimed at the young male demographic" and pointed out that, love it or loathe it, the series caters to a market otherwise sorely unserved by the "young adult fantasy genre that invariably reduces females to also-rans and decorative sidekicks".

While this may be true, the idea that you have to be a teenage girl to "get" Twilight is equally off the money – and I say that as a stuffy, bespectacled greying man rapidly approaching his 50th birthday who is looking forward to the arrival of Breaking Dawn: Part 2 this week with as much excitement as I await Steven Spielberg's reportedly awards-worthy Lincoln. Maybe even more…

So what exactly do I like so much about the series that some others take such delight in trashing? Well, quite a lot, actually. The first Twilight film is a very decent tale of high-school angst and teen alienation given an alt-lite grungy edge by Thirteen director Catherine Hardwicke. OK, so New Moon sags somewhat in the middle (a season-changing montage in which Bella appears to mope in a swivel chair for an entire year has become something of a standing joke) but at least it's enlivened by Michael Sheen not so much chewing as lasciviously licking the quasi-Papal scenery.

For my money, the third film, Eclipse, remains the best of the series, with Slade placing Kristen Stewart's heroine firmly in the narrative driving seat, emphasising her right to choose her own destiny, and giving the movie real bloodsucker bite.

As for Breaking Dawn: Part 1, my main regret is that no one offered it to David Cronenberg, the vampire-pregnancy narrative swerving so insanely from the sentimental to the psychotic that it positively cries out for the director of The Brood. As it was, safe pair of hands Bill Condon did his best to keep things on the right side of respectable, although I struggle to remember another 12A certificate film being quite this twisted.

Even the Twi-hardest fans of Meyer's fourth novel accept that there are still huge narrative problems afoot, and it will be interesting to see whether Condon can jump the hurdles of Breaking Dawn: Part 2 without descending into outrageous risibility. The thing is, I really want this movie (which I won't be seeing until Wednesday) to be good, even though others in my profession are clearly hoping for it to be terrible, giving them the opportunity to dish out more rib-tickling one-star kickings.

No matter – whatever happens, the Twilight series' positive legacy is already written in stone. A generation of young readers have spent hundreds – nay thousands – of hours reading Meyer's books with the same passion and enthusiasm that the great gothic novels once excited. Moreover, they have formed an extremely vocal and articulate fanbase whose obsessive dedication to the written word has effectively forced the film-makers to remain essentially respectful of the source texts.

And for those who sneeringly dismiss Meyer's work as mere Mormon-inspired "abstinence porn" (which is just a coolly cosmopolitan way of saying that heroines must be sexually active to be interesting), there's always the multi-million-selling Fifty Shades series, which has its roots in the soil of Twilight-inspired fan fiction, with E L James originally basing her central characters on Edward and Bella.

As for the movies, we wouldn't have the huge box-office hit The Hunger Games, with its ultra-feisty female lead played by rising star Jennifer Lawrence, were it not for the success of the Twilight series, which proved that a tale of an independent young woman torn between two buff blokes could become a box-office bonanza in a world where teenage boys once ruled the roost.

It's no surprise that paperback copies of Suzanne Collins's Hunger Games novels come emblazoned with a glowing quote from Stephenie Meyer, to whom all concerned owe a huge debt.

As for myself, I've had a lot more fun watching and arguing about the Twilight movies than I ever had with the Star Wars saga, that lumbering, narratively hobbled space opera which, we now learn, is to return to our screens for yet more boring instalments in the not too distant future. Apparently, that is meant to be exciting news, and cause of some rejoicing.

Honestly, give me Bella and Edward over Jar Jar Binks any day.