LET THE RIGHT ONE IN sss Directed by Tomas Alfredson Written by John Ajvide Lindqvist, based on his novel With Kare Hedebrant, Lina Leandersson, Per Ragnar, Henrik Dahl, and Karin Bergquist.
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Eight decades later, the vampire genre is more popular than ever, partly because writers have dragged the undead out of their remote, neogothic settings and into ever more familiar locales. In the 70s, TV and movie vampires began turning up in modern-day London (Dracula A.D. 1972), Los Angeles (Blacula), Las Vegas (The Night Stalker), suburban Pittsburgh (Martin), and small-town New England (Salem’s Lot). Bloodsuckers invaded Manhattan in Tony Scott’s The Hunger (1983) and Abel Ferrara’s The Addiction (1995), not to mention the suburban everytown of Sunnydale, California, in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie (1992) and TV series (1997-2003). And the trend continues with such recent projects as the HBO series True Blood, set in a hick town in Louisiana, and Catherine Hardwicke’s feature Twilight, set in a hick town in Washington state.
The movie was adapted by John Ajvide Lindqvist from his own novel, whose earliest pages establish the little community of Blackeberg as a sort of modernistic wasteland. A planned community in the middle of nowhere, built in the early 50s around a subway stop, it offers both everything and nothing: “There was a town center. There were spacious playgrounds allotted to children. Large green spaces around the corner. There were many pedestrian-only walking paths…. Only one thing was missing. A past. At school, the children didn’t get to do any special projects about Blackeberg’s history because there wasn’t one…. Where the three-storied apartment buildings now stood there had been only forest before. You were beyond the grasp of the mysteries of the past; there wasn’t even a church. Nine thousand inhabitants and no church. That tells you something about the modernity of the place, its rationality. It tells you something of how free they were from the ghosts of history and of terror. It explains in part how unprepared they were.”
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