Let the Right One In

Everyone knows a vampire can’t enter a house if he hasn’t been invited—it’s common knowledge. You have to call into your life whatever will destroy you… or maybe save you? Oscar is a lonely twelve-year-old boy living in a working-class neighborhood on the outskirts of Stockholm, at the very beginning of the eighties. At school he is brutally bullied, and all Oscar can do is run into the woods and there, in helpless rage, stab at trees with a knife, pretending those are his classmates. But Oscar isn’t the only one prowling the local forests with a knife. One day they find another boy his age there—with his throat cut, hung by the legs from a tree. They suspect a ritual killing. But Oscar’s thoughts are elsewhere: in the neighboring building, a very pretty girl moves in with her father. A strange family—staying indoors all day with the windows drawn. And with the girl something is clearly wrong, something strange. She comes out only at night… “Let Me In”—a dark, tense, original thriller that does away effortlessly with romantic clichés of genre vampire literature. Films based on the book were made both in the author’s homeland, Sweden, and in the United States. The director of the 2010 American adaptation of “Let Me In,” written by Lindqvist himself, was the well-known director Matt Reeves (“Planet of the Apes: Revolution”, “Planet of the Apes: War”, “Batman” (2022)).