Don’t let that little girl in!

I rented Let Me In the other night, now I can say I’ve seen the movie for the first time twice.

I mean of course, that I first saw the Swedish original, Låt den rätte komma in, 2008 (Let the Right One In.) It’s a charming coming-of-age-young-love-wimpy-kid-turns-on-the-bullies vampire story.

Stephen King called it, “The best American horror movie in 20 years.”

I don’t read much of King’s fiction, though what I have read is very effective in it’s genre. Once when I was living with a woman and working the midnight shift, I left for work one night leaving her reading Pet Sematery in bed.

I came back from work in the morning to find her sitting bolt upright in bed chewing her nails.

What I do read of King is his writing about writing. Dance Macabre is the best survey/analysis of horror fiction in print and movies I’ve ever read. He also gave the best advice about writing I’ve ever read. (Well, together with Heinlein’s James Forrestal Lecture to the graduating class at Annapolis, but that wasn’t exclusively about writing.)

King said, “You lift weights every day, you get big muscles. You write every day, you get to be a good writer.”

So it pains me to say, what the hell are you talking about Stephen King? Let Me In is not the best American horror movie in 20 years, it’s a Swedish movie!

Let Me In is Låt den rätte komma in, pretty much scene for scene, in most places line for line. I don’t see how they could credit Matt Reeves as the writer. He’s the adaptor. They should have credited the translator.

This is one of those things that legitimately embarrasses America in front of the Europeans, stealing something and filing the serial number off.

Oh there are some differences. In the Swedish movie the boy is blond and the girl is dark. In the American movie the boy is dark and the girl is blond. Oh yes, and it’s set in Los Alamos, New Mexico.

Understand, they did it just as well as the original, but only just as well – not better.

The movie took the trope of the little-girl vampire, first created I believe by Anne Rice, and did a better job with it. This of course is a variation on the evil children theme.

By the end of the movie you realize that Eli/Abby has recruited Oskar/Owen to be her new familiar, after the old one is used up. In return, he gets a friend cum demonic avenger.

(That has to be a universal desire among young boys. I recall a meeting with my son’s first-grade teacher after he made another boy cry. He’d gotten mad and told him he was going to send his pet cobra to bite him. The teacher asked a little uncertainly, “He doesn’t actually have one, does he?” Which should tell you something about the perceived eccentricity of our family.)

The film does a great job of portraying the seductive power of evil. As Eric Hoffer once said, “One tactic of the weak is to hint at their capacity for evil.”

Though Eli/Abby and her familiar kill several innocents, by the end of the film something inside you wants her to survive. And you feel a triumphant “Yes!” when she rips those nasty little shits to shreds in the swimming pool – because that’s what you wanted to do to them.

And maybe that’s the central point. What we want is not always what we should have. This is a horror movie where what you’re scared of isn’t external, it’s inside you.

Bottom line: even if you watch only the occasional horror movie, this is one you should check out. But if you’re not going to watch both, watch the Swedish version with subtitles.