Let The Right One In

Let The Right One In is a unique take on the genre of Vampire films from an adolescent point-of-view that combines horror with a boy-meets-girl, coming of age tale. The main character is a bullied boy named Oskar who's fascinated with serial killers. He meets a girl named Eli who's just moved in with her father, Hakan. It's very quickly shown that these two are not who they appear to be when Eli appears to Oskar in the freezing snow in her casual wear, completely unfazed by the cold, and her “father” starts murdering people and draining their blood.

The film plays around with the cliches of modern vampire stories by featuring a vampire that was turned before their sexual maturity, eternally stuck as a child, as opposed to the young adult or full-grown vampires that are usually seen in fiction. The title refers to the superstition that vampires can only enter a dwelling when invited, and at one point, Eli demonstrates what happens when she isn't invited with very unpleasant results. She is also not capable of feeding by herself as her victims will fight back and she is very uncomfortable with personally killing people. Thus she requires assistance from a guardian. The movie implies that Eli was not actually a girl at the time of turning into a vampire, with an incredibly brief shot of a castration scar, and as such, her statement of “I'm not a girl,” takes on a double meaning, with both, “I'm not female” and “I'm not human.”

Oskar assures Eli that he doesn't care about her issues and that he loves her anyway, and she promises to watch over him with his bully problems. By the end of the film, Hakan has died after feeding Eli one last time, Eli horrifically murders Oskar's bullies and he runs off with her, promising to stay with her and keep her fed, possibly eventually falling into the same exact role that Hakan had.