This weekend I went to see a vampire film. No, I didn’t go see that one. I went to see the other one. The one in Swedish named after lyrics from a Morrissey song. While Let the Right One In is presumably about a vampire (it’s never explicitly said… though if sleeping through the day, drinking blood, and bursting into flames when exposed to sunlight doesn’t make you a vampire, then I’m not really sure what that condition would be called), its main theme is about being an outsider.In recent years, popular culture has made vampires quite the sympathetic characters. And good for them really. For far too long it’s been all Nosferatu, Tom Cruise, and Gary Oldman’s shockingly ugly hairdo. You know, things you wouldn’t want to be around.
Working a different angle, authors like Charlaine Harris, Christopher Moore, and MaryJanice Davidson have been making vampires more… umm, human? Isolated and lonely, these characters are just as confused about their lives (or perhaps more accurately- their deaths) as anyone else. Sure, these insecure and flawed vampires are not particularly scary, but at this point, “frightening” vampire stories have kind of lost their bite.
That’s not to say Let the Right One In is without its frights. It has your requisite violence and gore and a climatic scene almost as unsettling as the one in There Will Be Blood. But in the end, perhaps the most disturbing part is how gentle a story it is despite, or maybe even because of, all the carnage.
posted by -jw-
