Let the Right One In (2008)

You know what I haven’t seen in a while? A vampire movie! That’s right. LET THE RIGHT ONE IN is another addition to vampire genre. There is a catch though, it was made in Sweden! I could be wrong, but I don’t think I have seen a Swedish film until now. I was looking at the geography to get a good sense of what Sweden is like. From what I can gather, there is a lot of snow and little sun. The combination of the two make the whitest people you have ever seen.

Netflix classified this movie as horror, but I would disagree. It’s definitely a romance film. Here is the plot. There is a little boy named Oskar (whitest kid I have ever seen in my life) who has a crush on his neighbor. They fall in love (in that little kid sort of way), but then a complication arises: she is a vampire!

I want to take another minute to thank Netflix for all their hard work to bring films like this to my computer screen. I wish I had a job at Netflix where I get to watch movies all day and pick which ones get to be put on instant. Then I get to supervise the transfer to whatever file type it is that runs in the instant player. Boy, that would be a wonderful job.

I also want to take a moment to discuss the use of vampires in film. There are universal truths about vampires that we all except. They live on blood, they burn in the sun, they don’t age, etc. We have never given a proper scientific explanation why these things affect vampires the way they do. It’s just accepted as common knowledge and vampire films rely on this common knowledge. This makes it so the writer doesn’t have to worry about creating rules for this supernatural phenomenon. They have already been defined in countless other vampire films. Now that I think about it, this is kind of a cop out. It’s easy to write a vampire story as opposed to creating your own supernatural human-beast-thing. In my opinion, the best way to use the vampire genre is with allegory.

In LET THE RIGHT ONE IN, there wasn’t much reason to have the girl be a vampire except to make the story a lot crazier (and bloody). Perhaps, it shows that love transcends vampire and human. It promotes interracial love.

There is one vampire rule that I didn’t know before watching this movie, but it is hinted at in the title. Whenever Eli is visiting, she has to be invited in by someone. I didn’t know vampires had to be invited in. That is so polite of them. Then they suck your blood and all politeness goes out the window.

Some little fun facts about the making of the film: Eli’s voice is not done by the actress playing her. It was all dubbed in by a woman who had a more androgynous voice. This makes for a much creepier experience. There aren’t too many cheap scares in the film. It’s never about trying to shock the audience with a loud abrupt sound. It’s a much more subtle experience. Going in, I was expecting to get scarred a lot more than I did. Instead, I found myself saying, “awwww.”

There is so much focus pulling going on in this movie. The way they set up the scenes are so creative and suspenseful. Sometimes, you are never completely sure where you are and it’s very disorienting. Sometimes, there will be really wide shots that hold for a long time then cut to an extreme close up of something. Every shot is composed with so much creativity and attention to lighting. Watching this movie will make you want to shoot something with an 85 mm lens of higher. There aren’t too many wide-angle shots.

LET THE RIGHT ONE is an amazing technical achievement as well as narrative achievement. Watching foreign films give you so many more ideas on how to shoot things than American films. This movie did nothing textbook and it succeeded wildly. I hear the director of CLOVERFIELD is going to do a remake of it. Do we want this? Can there be one foreign horror movie that doesn’t get turned into some American not-as-good-as-the-original bullshit?

Vampires are so hot right now. Even in Sweden.