Let the Right One In (Låt den rätte komma in, 2008)
Vampires are campy. It's hard to escape, but impossible to argue with. It was probably about five minutes after Bela Lugosi played Dracula when some kid hid behind his sleeve and imitated a Romanian accent and no time at all before everyone around rolled their eyes.
It's the cape, the neck biting, the recoiling from the cross- it all lends itself better to a night club than to a horror movie. George Hamilton's disco Dracula in Love at First Bite (1979) was no sillier than Frank Langella's disco Dracula in Dracula (1979). Gary Oldman, in Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992) had a chance to avoid the camp, by making him into a giant leathery bat monster, but instead they upped the ante giving him a tremendous queer hairdo and Keanu and Winona as costars.
Getting beyond Dracula to other takes on vampires, the camp is relentless: David Bowie is involved, Tom Cruise is wearing lipstick, Kiefer Sutherland is riding a motorcycle while an INXS song plays, and Romeo and Juliet is reenacted with vampires and werewolves carrying guns and wearing the costumes from The Matrix. Shall we talk about moving the vampires to the Pacific Northwest and making them sparkle?
We shan't.
You know what they say about watching sausage get made...
Trust those gloomy Swedes to return some dignity to the imperishable bloodsucker. The coffin-jockey in Let the Right One In is Eli, an apparent twelve year old girl, who befriends a bullied Fauntleroy who has murder fantasies of his own. The boy is Oskar, and he's unhealthily obsessed with homicide, to the point of even creeping out his forensic pathology teacher (actually, it may have been a literature class, but for some reason they were teaching forensic pathology). Being a murder nerd doesn't protect him from a constant assault of swirlies, wedgies, and thumpings, so it's just as well that his new playmate is a supernaturally powerful creature of the night. But it doesn't take a wall covered in newspaper clippings to figure out who might be behind the spate of killings in Oskar's village, not when a body is found dangling like a slaughtered hog draining red into a bucket.
Despite the morbid plot outline, this is actually a quite touching love story. The child actors are striking in appearance and talent. Their characters are smart but naive, passionate and awkward, and capriciously kind and cruel at once, like real children. In order for their love to blossom, he has to get over her horrible secret, and she has to get over their age difference. "Are you a vampire?" Oskar asks, in a tone of hurt accusation, like he was asking if she kissed his friend behind the school. Eli indulges Oskar's skepticism, enduring great pain and inducing some really cool and photogenic special effects.
Sweden is a great place for vampires, as we saw with Frostbitten. The sun goes down for a month at time, and it snows every night, filling in incriminating footprints. Efficient train service provides relocation for those who need new places to live after eating a conspicuous percentage of a town's population.
"Okay, yes! You can use my conditioner, just stop doing that!"
Let the Right One In is adapted from a novel, and of course the story is simplified and compressed in the film. Rather significant details about the character of Eli are revealed in the book, that are not clear in the movie. A quick partially nude scene was too quick to show what we are supposed to learn; it only made sense to me when I read an explanation later. No spoilers from me, you can look on your own, you pervert.
Lately there has been a controversy regarding the English subtitles of Let the Right One In. For whatever reason, simpler (dumbed down?) and less funny subtitles appear on the DVD than appeared in the theatrical release. An internet outcry seems to have convinced the publishers of the DVD to release a new version with better subtitles, at some point.