Let the Right One In

Reviewers for The Gaurdian have been examining Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In so frequently that I’ve felt redundant contributing when I know at least some of you are readers of their horror archives. However, I’ve finally begun to disagree with their reviews enough to post something argumentative here. Actually, I don’t completely disagree with their reviewers---I also loved the movie very much, and am struck with utter dismay to hear that “A wholly unnecessary American remake is in pre-production.”* Each of their writers has enthusiastically embraced Alfredson’s film as the newest in a fresh wave of Scandinavian horror, citing it repeatedly as the mindful alternative to the American Twilight. They are right—Let the Right One In succeeds in ways Twilight most definitely fails; it’s a thoughtful, tender, and somewhat emotion-rending study of the agony that is adolescence. It is, however, in no way a horror film, and unlike Twilight, it’s quite aware of the limits adolescence places on any love story. Comparisons to George Romero and Abel Ferrara are painfully mistaken attempts to comprehend the film through the often-reductive lens of a genre—something that simply overlooks everything valuable about the movie. Comparisons to J.K. Rowling’s writing are simply too absurd to address.

The movie is rather a self-aware revision of Twlight: it’s a love story with a refreshing understanding that seeking love as an antidote to profound isolation courts relationships framed with violence and abuse. Oskar and Eli’s interaction is far more compelling than that of Edward and Bella. It’s tender, hasty, and mutually abusive; it’s the kind of dynamic we find when we don’t characterize children as ideals, or pretend they can love with the consideration that only comes with maturity. Eli and Oskar are first and foremost children: sweet, selfish, and extremely unpredictable. Any romantic belief that a child vampire can possess an immortal love bought by perpetual youth overlooks the film’s most heartbreaking character: Eli’s caretaker and (presumably) former childhood sweetheart, who, with age, increasing senility, and incompetence, fails to care for her or fulfill the goals of his own affection. His fall and replacement are simply tragic, and though every phase of Eli and Oskar’s romance is so touching, it is also reasonably pessimistic. Claims that the director and writer have “sacrificed the value of narrative in favour of horror and fear” are almost shameful misreadings of a film that is all narrative, and no horror, save that felt when watching children struggle to face a fundamentally hostile world. The horror of reality is so great that a young girl childishly indifferent to the coagulate glutting her teeth and staining her clothes is an attractive alternative, and I am somewhat inclined to read Oskar’s beloved Eli as a fantasy, a psychological escape from one violence to another (this is my tentative reading of Eli’s unexplained scar). Whichever way you read the narrative, the fantasy feels deeply real, and the film seems an apt overture to our misguided fascination with young love.

*This article cites the possible location of the remake as Littleton, CO, the place of the Columbine shootings. I am not sure I need to say so, but for the director of Cloverfield to make a vampire movie about school bullying in which the heroine brutally slaughters the bullies seems to me to be the least tactful of all possible courses of action.