Carlisle Cullen supposedly has no supernatural powers in the Twilight movies, and there's an easy explanation as to why that is. Played by Peter Facinelli across the five franchise installments, Carlisle is the adoptive father of Robert Pattinson's Edward Cullen, a former member of the Volturi, and one of The Twilight Saga's oldest vampires. While he may not have a supernatural gift like some of the other Cullens, though, Carlisle does still exhibit a unique special ability in the movies.

The powers that vampires have in the Twilight franchise are not particularly consistent. As proven by Alice Cullen’s ability to envision an individual’s potential future via touch and Edward’s ability to read minds, many of the Twilight Saga's vampires gain a supernatural skill when they are turned. Typically, these abilities evolve from whatever their existing aptitudes were as humans. For example, Alice could always sense future danger and envision events that hadn’t occurred yet, making her foresight an inevitable extension of this skill. However, some major Twilight characters, such as Edward’s adoptive mother, Esme Cullen, have no powers in the Twilight movies, with no explanation being provided for this disparity.

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Carlisle also falls victim to this fate in the Twilight movie adaptations. On paper, the Cullen patriarch seems the most likely candidate to have an impressive power in the family, as he is the oldest and the founding member of the Cullen clan. However, according to Twilight author Stephenie Meyer, Carlisle doesn’t possess a quantifiable supernatural power. This claim flies in the face of what fans encounter in the Twilight movies and novels, though, as Carlisle’s ability to survive by drinking only animal blood marked him out as the first known vampire with the willpower to avoid feeding on humans.

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Carlisle's unique feeding trait arguably constitutes a superpower, given how rare it is in the world of Twilight. The revelation that Twilight’s vampires don’t need human blood to survive was so unexpected that it was borrowed by Netflix’s Midnight Mass more than a decade later. The reason behind this unlikely borrow is that the twist reconfigures how audience members perceive vampires since the revelation calls into question how much Twilight’s vampires choose to be monsters and how much they are cursed by fate. If Carlisle Cullen has no superpower, as Twilight's author claims, then every Twilight vampire could survive off animal blood if they so chose.

This means that the majority of Twilight’s vampires aren’t monsters in the traditional sense, since they can be killed, albeit by dramatic means, they can survive sunlight, and they don’t need to kill to survive. While Twilight changed a lot of details about vampire lore, the claim that there is nothing superhuman about Carlisle’s power to resist human blood is arguably the biggest change the franchise made to the traditional bloodsucker mythos. If any vampire can follow Carlisle’s lead and avoid feeding off humans by choice, then The Twilight Saga’s vampires are missing the core element that makes vampires vampires: the need to feed off a living host for sustenance. Thus, Carlisle Cullen does, in fact, have a supernatural level of willpower that constitutes a superpower in the Twilight movies — it’s just not a trait his creator thinks is worth noting.

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