by Kendall Newton
Contributing writer
With Halloween approaching, it’s time to watch scary movies. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to find good horror films, but 2008’s “Let the Right One In” is one of the best.
The fact that it’s a Swedish film may turn some people off, but I implore you be open-minded and try it out instead of cheating and watching the inferior 2010 American remake, “Let Me In.”
The movie, based on the Swedish book of the same name, is about Oskar, a young, bullied boy in 1980s Sweden who meets Eli, a strange, young girl who helps him find the strength to stand up for himself.
What we learn is that this quiet, charismatic girl is a vampire, but not like any I’ve seen in any other movies.
It’s refreshing to see a new approach to a horror subgenre that’s grown repetitive with its typical glamorous and regal vampires.
The two leads, played by Kåre Hedebrant and Lina Leandersson, exude genuine childlike awkwardness with the perfect amount of peculiar darkness, but it’s not always believable that Leandersson’s Eli is a centuries-old vampire and not just a weird 12-year-old girl.
There is an unsettling, otherworldly feel to the movie. The foreignness of the snowy, Swedish landscape and the ambient score really add to the sense that something isn’t right.
When it came out in 2008, many critics heralded it as not only the best horror film of the decade, but the best movie of the year. It only missed out on being nominated for the Best Foreign Film Academy Award because of a technicality.
This isn’t a horror film like any other. It’s not incredibly gory or jump-out-of-your-seat scary. Instead, it has a measured, eerie tone and a theme to eat into your psyche.
American scary movies are becoming so formulated and predictable that it’s time to start looking elsewhere for good scares. This film, along with France’s “Martyrs” (2008), Spain’s “The Orphanage” (2007) and essentially anything Japanese are good places to start.