The Best Movie of 2008

And the best vampire movie ever made*:

Let the Right One In


It's Swedish. It has subtitles. It is already being remade in American, for people who can't read so good, probably with Catherine Hardwicke directing a script rewritten by Kevin Williamson, starring Haley Joel Osment and Abigail Breslin.

The original movie is fantastic. It is what every one of the countless vampire movies/series made recently wishes it could be--good. It is what every horror movie made lately wishes it could be--scary without trying too hard.

Instead of quick cuts, depriving the audience of information, surprising them, jolting them out of their seats, Let the Right One In chooses a creepier path--long, lingering, right-there-out-in-front-of-you shots. The violence speaks for itself, its import is allowed to creep into your brain, the characters get developed, humanized.

Instead of your typical bloodthirsty, vengeful villain, Eli is a vampire who hates what she is, what it makes her do; she feels remorse and shame after each thirst is quenched. She wants desperately to be good, to be normal, but knows it is impossible and that her fate is sealed. A girl's gotta eat!**

My favorite aspect of the movie--spoilers ahead--is that although the little vixen ultimately makes the boy her next mortal slave, and a no-doubt-centuries-long tradition continues, it appears as though the future will be brighter for Eli, that she has grown a sense of purpose, maybe even a social conscience.

She will no longer be alone; she will have a friend. No longer will she hunt the innocent, no longer will she force somebody else to kill for her: she will simply unleash this vulnerable boy--as one might send a blind chicken into a den of hungry foxes--into a world full of bullies and feast on his cruel tormentors.

Which is kind of a beautiful thing, when you think about it. The two ultimately form a symbiotic partnership, each benefiting from the other. Hell--they could travel the world as a team, roaming from here to there at will, attracting the local riff-raff and destroying them. And would that be so bad?

Probably good for the gene pool, right?



* The second-best vampire movie ever made.

** A friend recently told me that a friend told her--did I lose you yet?--that things are a bit different in the book, that Eli is a boy who chopped off his dick because he didn't want sexuality getting in the way of his vampirism. Which gives a different meaning to her "I am not a girl" utterance than I initially gathered and sort-of explains the odd full-frontal-genital shot we get of Eli in the movie, but actually just confuses things a whole helluva lot...

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