‘Be Me, For a Little While’

This chapter discusses Tomas Alfredson's Let the Right One In as one of the best new horror films since the genre's last great creative flourishing in the 1970s. It highlights some of Let the Right One In's back story and compares it with other horror movies made in the 1990s or the 2000s, such as The Lost Boys (1987), Bram Stoker's Dracula (1993), and Blade (1998) as venerable classics of vampire cinema. It also describes Let the Right One In's Eli as a type of vampire that is very different to Twilight's (2008) Edward Cullen, the undead hero. The chapter reviews movie vampires that come in all shapes and styles, and the vampire myth that is both durable and flexible enough to embrace many different permutations. It cites a vampire that appeared in an episode of Doctor Who called Journey Into Terror in 1965.

Introduction

This chapter introduces the Swedish vampire film, Låt den rätte komma (Let the Right One In), which not only stands out from contemporary vampire films, but ranks among the very best vampire movies of the past century. The chapter mentions director Tomas Alfredson and screenwriter John Ajvide Lindqvist, who adapted Låt den rätte komma from his own novel of the same name. It also mentions a song by the lugubrious British rock singer-songwriter Morrissey as Lindqvist's inspiration for the title of his novel 'Let the Right One Slip In'. It recounts Let the Right One In's world premiere on 26 January 2008 at the Göteborg International Film Festival in Sweden and screening at other festivals in Europe, North America, Australia and South Korea. The chapter explains why Let the Right One In stands head and shoulders above other recent horror movies like Twilight from 2008.

The Other Swedish Vampire Movie

This chapter compares Tomas Alfredson's Let the Right One In with Anders Banke's Frostbiten (2006), the only other non-porn Swedish vampire movie to date. It examines how Frostbiten takes a larkier, more scattershot approach to the horror genre. It also reviews how Frostbiten begins with snow falling and is followed with a prologue set in Ukraine in 1944, where five soldiers are attacked in the dark by a mysterious creature. The chapter describes Frostbiten as a sloppy but mostly lively horror comedy with its plotting, camerawork and framing that seems arbitrary, and numerous scenes serving no particular function other than half-hearted attempts to convey a bond between mother and daughter. It points out how the plot of Frostbiten turns on repeated instances of people willingly swallowing a drug without knowing what it is.