Essay --

There are numerous aspects of Let the Right On In that show it to be traditional and yet untraditional when one considers vampire mythology—in essence a hybrid. As Jules Zanger describes modern vampires, it is easy to identify the how many traits of the story’s vampire, Eli, to be modern, and the story in general to be modernized. Despite the subtle references to Dracula, this movie desexualizes the vampire, accepting friendship as opposed to leading a solitary life, and shows her to be sympathetic and possible even gaining the audience’s (and Oskar’s) approval of her existence. The sexual overtones of many vampire stories, including recent ones, in which the vampire bite serves as a stand-in or metaphor for penetration, undergo a radical shift in Let the Right One In. She appears to be young, barefoot, and showing a pale complexion with modest green eyes with dark rings under them. She does not seem to have been living as for centuries as our classic vampires seems to, but rather, she is stuck in this girl’s body. Let the Right One In is absolutely not about sex even if the movie’s primary relationship is romantic. Considering vampire folklore revolves around sex or some form of sexual aura, Let the Right One In completely deviates from this. The vampire in this story, Eli, is not sexualized at all, but rather de-sexualized. There is nothing â€Å"sexually appealing† about an ostensibly asexual girl stuck in a 12-year old body. Important as well is their budding affection that encompasses physical closeness but is emphatically not sexu al. On one level, this exchange illustrates what ‘going steady’ means to 12 year-olds: it is an affirmation of friendship and loyalty quite disconnected from overt sexuality. In one scene, Oscar and ... ...ive friendship and allowing a tender love-friendship grow between Oskar and Eli. A third way that Eli is parallel to classic vampires, say Dracula, is that Eli is cut off from human society in a profound way. Though she is not immediately identified as a vampire, her appearance and behaviour mark her as an outsider. Just as Dracula is visually and audibly coded as an ‘immigrant’ or ‘foreign’, Eli is set apart from clean-cut, blonde Swedish types by her tousled, dark hair and unkempt, waif-like appearance. Her divergence is particularly striking because, with one exception, all other characters in the film are ethnic Swedes. Like classic vampire films, Eli is an outside figure and is invariably menacing, becoming a manifestation of the audience’s deepest fears, while simultaneously feeling compassion and understanding for her alienation, exclusion, and difference.