Film Review: Let the Right One In

5 out of 5 Bloody Knives

This weekend, hoards of young women have lined up to see the movie version of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight.  While I enjoy a good vampire movie as much and possibly more than the next man, I often long for something a little less commercial.  If you agree, skip the multiplex in favor of your local art house and buy a ticket to Let the Right One In.

Superficially, the two films would seem to have much in common.  Like Twilight, Let the Right One In is based on a highly successful first novel.  Swedish author John Ajvide Lindqvist’s premise may sound similar too.  The lonely, wispy Oskar finds friendship and perhaps even love with the immortal Eli.  But these similarities are deceptive.

Oskar is not merely lonely.  He is completely cut off from all human contact.  He has no friends and is constantly picked on at school.  His divorced mother treats him like an annoyingly mobile piece of furniture.  There is a scene in which Oskar visits his father.  They play tic-tac-toe with perfect contentment.  But when a friend drops by with a bottle, it is as though Oskar ceases to exist.  His happy face closing up in disappointment is perhaps the saddest image in the film.  In his way, Oskar is not so different from Eli, who has “been twelve for a long time.”  Both are cut off from the human world by circumstances neither can change.

Eli spattered in blood (a rare scene in the film)

Running counter to all of this is Eli’s deteriorating relationship with her aging, incompetent Renfield.  While she obviously loved him once, she grows less tolerant as his bungling deprives her of blood and exposes her to the police.  In the end, she kills him with a certain tenderness, but with little remorse.  As the movie draws to a close, Oskar is forced to flee with Eli.  He does so happily enough, but we can see the life—and the death–that await him all to clearly.  We are left to wonder how many times Eli has been through this cycle, and if this is what she had in mind for Oskar all along.

Let the Right One In makes beautiful use of Sweden’s bleak winter landscapes and institutional apartment blocks and schools.  One of the film’s central images is a pathetically small jungle-gym crusted with snow.  The gore is minimal, but shocking when it appears.  Most of Eli’s powers are suggested by artful misdirection and some animalistic Foley effects.  The climatic confrontation between Eli and Oskar’s schoolyard tormentors is a masterpiece of cinematic understatement that put me in mind of Val Lewton’s Cat People.

Both the young leads, Kåre Hedebrant as Oskar and Lina Leandersson as Eli, are superb.  Like the film itself, their performances are subtle, never splashy.  They are a darker Peter Pan and Wendy, a tiny thread of nascent sexuality running through all their awkward interactions.  While superficially a love story, Let the Right One In unfolds with the inevitability of a tragedy.  It reminds us that there is a price to be paid whenever human and monster meet.

Dave Hurwitz

Edward Cullen, Angel, Louis, Barnabas and Blacula (The Evolution of the Caring Vampire)

Jonathan Fritz as Barnabas Collins

It all started with a mistake. Vampires were supposed to be evil. Spawns of the night. Supernatural fiends. At least this had been the norm for a great deal of the genre. This all changed in the spring of 1967, when a third rated ABC sought to boost ratings on it’s soap opera Dark Shadows by introducing Barnabas Collins, a vampire.

He was intended for only one season, and like his predecessors, was to be villainous. Afterward, torrents of mail kept the character alive. A Van Helsing type character, Dr. Julian Hoffman, was added to hunt and destroy the vampire. However a typo changed the character to Julia, filled by actress Grayson Hall.

The show finally developed a love triangle, with Julia in love with Barnabas (played by Jonathan Frid), and the vampire pining away for his reincarnated love, Josette (played by Kathryn Leigh Scott). Suddenly the vampire took the lead role, even entering hero status.

The first movie to capitalize on this new trend was Blacula. Yes, Blacula. Sure it’s filled with incredibly dated attire (the vampire hardly stands out in his cape), but it also had the superb acting of William Marshall to hold it together. A similar storyline of a lost love reincarnated drives the vampire. Ultimately, his love perishes. Rather than go on living without her, Blacula destroys himself through exposure to sunlight.

William Marshall as Blacula

Now, there could no more sympathetic vampire than Anne Rice’s Louis. Suddenly the entire story revolves around the vampire. He is the main character, the hero, the reason for the story. Louis (played by Brad Pitt) struggles with his vampirism. In the “Special Introduction” to the DVD for Interview with the Vampire, she states, “I wanted you to fall in love with the vampire and see things through his eyes.”

Brad Pitt as Louis in Interview with the Vampire

Fast forward to a new television series setting a teenage cheerleader against hordes of vampires. Buffy the Vampire Slayer was born. Angel (played by David Boreanaz) is different from the spawn that seek to drain humans like so many Capri Suns. He is cursed, giving him a conscience of sorts. Additionally, he becomes a romantic interest to Buffy, though it is a relationship they can never consummate. The curse that keeps Angel tame would also be reversed should he ever achieve true happiness.

Angel and Buffy

This tortured relationship is the main thrust of Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight novel. Edward Cullen (played by Robert Pattinson) is a self-proclaimed “vegetarian” vampire, feeding only on animals (much like Louis). He and Bella Swan (played by Kristen Stewart) engage in a boiling romance that can never come to fruition. Edward must fight every instinct not to eat the girl (falling into much the same trap as Angel and Buffy).

Edward Cullen sparkling in the sunlight

So when you read or watch Twilight, think about the vampires that came before, and led to development of the caring, hunky vampire that is Edward Cullen.

Tim Kane

Visit this related post by Dave: “Can Sex with a Vampire Get You Pregnant“

Chest Fluid and Post-Surgical Asphyxiation

The body is stupid.  Unlike the brain, it has not learned to vary its tricks to suit new situations.

Take how the body responds to wounds, for example.  Say you have a cut or a scrape on your knee.  Even if it resists infection, you’ll notice that it purges a small amount of clear, faintly yellowish fluid.  (If you’ve ever pressed a bit too hard on scab, you’ll know what I’m talking about.)  On external wounds, purging is a pretty good design concept.  It washes potentially infectious crap out of the wound.  Once the injury seals over, it creates a buffer zone between the wound and the scab.  All in all, pretty clever.  But the same system that works so well on the body’s surface becomes a liability if your wound is on the inside.

To be fair, there are some places in the body where a little fluid buildup is no big deal, the leg for instance.  You may get a bit swollen, but the blood will carry the unwanted liquid off to your bladder eventually.  The chest cavity, however, is another matter.

One of the stranger byproducts of heart surgery is chest-fluid purge created by the body in response to the incisions.  If left to its own devices, it will fill all the available space inside the chest cavity.  This is bad for a couple of reasons.  For one, the same fluid that washes wounds clean on the outside becomes a stagnant, bacterial soup on the inside.  For another, it can compress the lungs, making it difficult to breathe.  This is why surgeons leave drainage tubes sticking out of patient’s abdomens.

Really Big Needle

Those tubes, of course, have to come out eventually.  Sometimes, they come out too soon.  Purge continues to accumulate.  When that happens, you have to get the fluid out with a needle.  A very big needle.

I’ve had this done exactly twice, and it is a surreal and frightening experience, even for an adult.  The needle is inserted into your back.  Despite the Novocain, you can feel it punching through the chest wall.  They syringe attached to the needle is ridiculously large, like something out of a Warner Brothers’ cartoon.  Purge fluid is slowly siphoned out of your chest and squirted into an IV bag.  This can go on for thirty minutes or more.  Sometimes you need more than one bag.  The fluid itself is cola brown with a hint of cherry.  You know you’re done when you feel the tip of the needle prick your lungs.  The entire procedure hurts like a son of a bitch, but it beats being strangled slowly from within.

The last time I went through this, my surgeon removed one and three quarter liters of fluid from my chest.  I didn’t quite beat the record for my hospital, which was two and a tenth.  So you see, the body is stupid.  Unlike the brain, it has not learned to vary its tricks to suit new situations.  It will kill you if you let it.

Dave Hurwitz

Mad Mary (Why We Love to Be Scared)

Children love to be scared. The night before Halloween, a colleague and I hosted a Scary Story night at our elementary school. We both teach sixth grade, and up until this year, our school had a tradition of scaring kids the night before Halloween. Not this year. I guess many of the teachers were tired of coming in after working all day. They cancelled the event. So we took it upon ourselves to continue the tradition, but for sixth graders only.

In years past, I learned what kids like in a scary story. I was always limited to just how scary to be because we had younger kids about. But not this year. Also, it helps if you mix a bit of humor in with every story, so the kids get a chance to let off some of the building terror. And of course, atmosphere plays a big part.

This year we had the kids all to our own. No younger siblings. Even the parents who brought them stayed away for the hour. We decked out the classroom with candles, and a strobe light (the usual).

The story I told them ran as follows:

It seemed there was a girl named Mary. As she grew up, she became more and more insane. Her parents were very old and didn’t want to send her to a mental hospital. They kept her at home away from any other people.

But Mary grew worse. She would growl like a wild animal and gnaw on the furniture like a dog. One day she attacked her mom. Bit her in the arm. Blood was everywhere.

Her father yanked Mary away, but didn’t have the heart to call the police. You see, he still loved her. But she was out of control.

He chained her arms to a tree. He brought her food and water every day, but never unchained her. There she stayed for a whole year.

Now, I told you that her parents were very old. They both passed away suddenly one night, leaving Mary totally alone. She cried all day and all night, calling their names. No one answered. They were dead.

But Mary was still chained to the tree. Unable to get food or water.

For several days she screamed for help, but the house was high up in the Julian hills. There was no one around for miles.

Finally, insane with hunger, she snatched a squirrel off a branch and ate it. Whole. The blood reminded her of when she bit her mother’s arm.

For the next few years, this was how Mary survived. She ate animals that strayed too close. She sucked the dew off grass. All that time she was chained to the tree. Her hair grew down below her bottom. Her fingernails grew long and sharp. She used them like knives to catch her food. And her eyes showed a growing madness.

Finally, the bolts that attached the chain to the tree pulled loose. Mad Mary was free. She scampered off into the woods, dragging the chains behind her.

Every few years after that, farmers would find a that a cow had been killed at night. The animal was sliced open along the gut. Mary had used her long sharp fingernails. And the insides were chewed up.

The story continued with an “actual” sixth grade student having an encounter with Mad Mary at Camp Marston. I kept this tame to get it past the principal. It had a moral undercurrent of being prepared and sticking with a buddy.

Now the actual story I heard was less detailed. I remember hearing about the cattle mutilations, imagining the ultra long fingernails and wild eyes. Of course I heard the story over a campfire under a night sky. Very spooky. The camp even had a tree with the manacles still bolted in. That was the best part. Scared the crap out of me.

Obviously, the camp had to take them down. None of the existing counselors remembered Mad Mary. I did a search for her, but came up with nothing.

Earlier, on one of my first visits to Camp Marston as a sixth grade teacher, I dropped hints about Mad Mary to many of the kids. We arrived at camp on a Monday and left on a Friday. For several days I got little to no response. I had pointed out a tree that looked like it had been clawed by Mary. Everything changed on Wednesday.

At lunch recess, two contractors were repairing a door. I casually told the students that Mad Mary had ripped it off. They went to ask the contractors, who, going along with the gag, said that she had.

Within a few minutes, students were seeing Mad Mary everywhere. In the trees. In the shadows. I had to start backpedaling, saying that the story was made up. I did some damage control.

Usually on Wednesday, we teachers drive into town for dinner, skipping the meal with the kids. Big mistake. A student from a different school had been nervous about life at camp. For the past few days he had not defecated, scared of the walk to the bathroom outside his cabin. That night, the constipation had reached breaking point, so to speak, and he passed out. Immediately, students spread the rumor that somehow Mad Mary had done the deed.

I was reprimanded for spreading the story. The student recuperated at the hospital. Everything went pretty much back to normal. But I remembered the incident. I was amazed at how much a single story could affect people.

Tim Kane