There will be blood

Every generation experiences it. It’s like a flu wave, coming and going with scary regularity: vampires, worming their way into films, books and culture. Whether it’s Christopher Lee first baring his fangs in the ‘50s Hammer horror flicks, or Blacula offering an African-American angle in the ‘70s, vampires keep coming back from the dead to infest popular culture.

We had our parodies (Love at First Bite, Dracula: Dead and Loving It and that horrible Eddie Murphy movie), our camp (Bram Stoker’s Dracula directed by Coppola), our TV cult shows (Buffy The Vampire Slayer) and the more serious stuff that explored vampirism as a disease, an illness, or the wave of the future (Kathryn Bigelow’s After Dark, the Blade graphic novels and movies, the recent I Am Legend remake with Will Smith).

Then, it all went back to the kiddies. With the massive popularity of Twilight — the books, the movie — an aging genre knew it could once again draw fresh blood by biting into a perennial market: youth. And if that isn’t vampiric by definition, then I don’t know what is.

The Twilight books, as some have noted, may simply be “Sweet Valley High” with an undead angle, but that’s where the money is, apparently. Soon after, HBO came up with its own contribution to vampire lore: Alan Ball’s True Blood takes off from a series of novels that explore a world where vampires are everywhere, but in hiding; only a Japanese-made synthetic blood (“Tru Blood”) can sate their thirst and make them palatable to the rest of the world. The show opts for hipness and young actors (well, young-ish in the case of Anna Paquin), but it’s less about teen angst and more about clashing cultures.

Much more exciting to tweeners was Twilight, with its typical high-school troubles amplified by a girl’s infatuation with a moody vampire. Sure, the prose may make those who’ve been around the block gag; the movie hype may make you want to reach for a wooden stake; but female audiences here, even those well into their 30s, were seen tugging at their collars and whispering at the screen, whenever lead undead guy Robert Pattinson showed up, “Bite me! Bite me!” So apparently there’s still some juice left in the moldy old formula.

But let’s face it: Twilight is just a chick flick with fangs. The real deal is Swedish director Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In. Released in 2008, but set in a desolate Stockholm in the early ‘80s, it follows 12-year-old Oskar (played by Kåre Hedebrant), a lonely kid bullied by his classmates, who befriends the new girl in the tenement, Eli (Lina Leandersson), a spooky kid with big eyes whose “daddy,” we quickly learn, has a night-shift job draining blood from local teenagers. It’s the kind of setting where the same characters sit around every day in a local diner, smoking and talking about the “strange guy” who’s just moved into the neighborhood with the little girl.

Meanwhile, Oskar, with the encouragement of Eli, takes on the bullies and learns to assert himself in a world of separated parents, cold, indifferent adults and morbidly cruel children.

The relationship between Oskar and Eli here kicks the crap out of the one depicted in Twilight. It’s truer, better written, and much better acted than anything Kristen Stewart and Pattinson exchanged in the big Hollywood hit movie. It’s darker, first of all, because Eli simply has an irresistible thirst for blood. She leaps on unsuspecting prey from trees, dropping down like a bat to extract her daily sustenance. She spends half the movie with her face covered in gore, yet remains sympathetic. Eli might not even be a girl; she claims as much, and the novel suggests she might be an androgynous, castrated boy. As for Oskar, he’s smitten, but he’s also trying to show that he’s tough, a suitable boyfriend. And though it avoids the sexual implications of Twilight’s teen vampires (these kids are 12, after all), the pairing of Eli and Oskar still pulsates onscreen. It’s the oddest relationship in recent movie history, yet seems believable because it’s steeped in and observed from the awkwardness of youth.

It’s also creepy as hell. Memories of Danny Glick scratching on windowpanes in the old Salem’s Lot will be stirred among Gen-Xers, but there’s plenty else for true horror fans to sink their teeth into. This is no “vampire lite” entry (“less calories, less blood”), but it doesn’t depend on gore to get its scariness across.

At first, I couldn’t tell if Let the Right One In was set in the past, or if the phonograph players, Rubik’s cube, vintage TVs and furniture were supposed to represent the latest in Swedish advances. But this is the place that gave the world Ikea, for God’s sake! And ABBA! Alfredson captures the ‘70s/’80s era in smart details, devoid of technological distractions, and left to the devices of kids’ creepy imaginations. He has a real flair for long shots of dark school hallways, desolate, horizontal compositions and diffused room lighting. The kids in Stockholm seem to trek to school at 7 p.m., during the few hours of sunlight, in this topsy-turvy world. There, teachers invite police in to class to discuss murder cases and the evils of drugs. I’m sure most kids growing up there are ready for hard drinking by the time they’re 15.

The movie’s title derives from vampire lore. It’s said that a vampire cannot enter a home unless the inhabitant invites it inside. But “Let the right one in” also suggests Eli’s ceaseless search for suitable life partners, those who understand her plight and are still willing to hang around. After all, she’s “been 12 years old for a very long time,” we are told.

Vampires may be experiencing a pop cultural resurgence because today’s generation is so fixated on all-nighters. They say they get their best work done in the wee hours; all their friends are up and about, after all; fast-food restaurants now offer them 24-hour drive-through service; and a wave of sleepless call center agents in Manila is bringing new meaning to the term “undead.” No wonder, then, that older generations who spot these kids emerging from their darkened catacombs after 3 p.m. the following day, searching for a cup of coffee or the nearest Starbucks, have come to believe that vampires actually do exist.

Ah, the children of the night; what music they make.