According to Stephen King in his pseudo-theory pop culture textbook Danse Macabre, as well as the dominant sentiment of popular culture, vampires are sex, pure and simple. It’s not hard a hard sell: the fluid exchange, the penetration, the ecstasy of the bite, the corruption of innocence…the metaphors and entendre go on and on. Much of the horror of vampires is wrapped up in the fact that they represent a kind of perfect concentration of our ideal/unconscious sexuality, with none of the drawbacks or insecurities that so often plague the psyches of horror’s traditional key audience (young men) (77).[1] So what does it mean to the vampire mythos and to the horror genre when the sex so central to the monster’s construction is subverted, relocated, or taken out of the equation altogether? From where does the Horror come? These questions become very salient when considering the superlative Swedish film Let the Right One In, a work that challenges assumptions about the roles of sex, gender, and monster archetypes to the genre, and the very mechanisms of horror.
Let the Right One In does not completely confound King’s definitions of horror, however; in some ways, its horror is very traditional. For example, it operates within King’s Three Levels of Horror. The Terror comes from scenes such as the one in the pool at the end, during which the gruesomely supernatural nature of the dismemberment is mostly hinted at (with the exception of a few eventual bloody body parts)—muffled sounds, the little boy’s feet being dragged along the surface length of the pool, and an eventual wide shot that mostly serves up the gore in abstract shapes, more terrible from a distance and in the audience’s imagination than any close-up of viscera could be. The “gross-out” Revulsion is around every celluloid corner of the movie, found in the blood caked around Eli’s mouth in seemingly more scenes than not, the stomach-churning sounds of necks snapping and flesh ripping, more pools and streams of blood, Håkan’s acid-melted face, Eli’s mutilated (missing) genitals[2], and even more blood. The capital-H Horror in Let the Right One In, is, however, a little harder to pinpoint, and will be addressed in more detail below. Also within the realm of tradition, the film traffics in both kinds of horror that King outlines: “those in which the horror results from an act of free and conscious will—a conscious decision to do evil—and those in which the horror it predestinate, coming from outside like a stoke of lightning” (71). The former is most evident in Håkan and the bullies, who consciously and consistently decide to do ill, and the latter is personified in Eli, an otherwise gentle and tender child(?) who is evil only because vampires are inherently evil. But Let the Right One In is in no way a traditional vampire film, and its well of Horror, although still emanating from the space between Terror and Revulsion, comes less from the audience’s expectations of Terror visualized Revulsively (as King seems to suggest most Horror is) and more from the subversion of assumed horror values of vampiric sexuality.
As King is quick to point out in Danse Macabre, sex is scary. It is especially so for teenagers/young men who, inexperienced and often misinformed, face a variety of pressures and fears and are vulnerable to insecurities about sexual changes, performance, and identity. For King, what makes vampires so sexy/scary/appealing to horror’s key audience[3] is that, beyond just being able to exercise their animalistic sexual urges whenever they want, they also never have to worry about failing to perform: “best of all, perhaps, in the eyes of those millions of teenaged boys…is the fact that the Vampire doesn’t even have to get it up” (77). Indeed, “Count Dracula (and the weird sisters as well) are apparently dead from the waist down; they make love with their mouths alone” (75). Of course, this is doubly true for Eli, who literally has nothing below the waist, and must exercise her sexuality through other means. It is no accident that there is so much oral imagery in Let the Right One In[4]; it is a pattern that suggests not only classic vampire motifs, but also infantile oral fixations, which are significantly related to the central portrayal of youth and youth sexuality in the film. But the variation on, rather than the adherence to classic vampiric sexuality is what is most important to the film’s Horror.
Let the Right One In essentially subverts the classic sexuality of vampires and vampire stories, stripping the vampire of any romanticism[5] (which isn’t to say that the film is not romantic) traditionally associated with the most iconic aspects of the monster. Eli doesn’t have any overtly phallic fangs (in fact, the film never shows her as possessing fangs; the only thing that suggests them is her bite on Virginia’s neck, a stereotypical pair of holes), her bites inspire anything but ecstasy, and she does not seduce her victims. The bitings in Let the Right One In are depicted less as primal rapes (as King describes most vampire attacks) and more like animal maulings. The central vampire of the film is female (or at least feminine), which undermines, or at least modifies, the power play usually inherent in the vampire-bites-buxom-babe trope. The film’s subversion of classic horror sex doesn’t mean in any way, however, that sex is absent from the movie. If anything, the film’s sexual aspects work more effectively towards true horror than any traditional depictions could in an age so familiar and jaded about what vampire sexuality is all about. Because Eli is physically sexless, and her attacks are less sexualized than animalized, the audience has to focus on even more taboo sexual areas. Some of the sweetest scenes in the movie are also the most unsettling. An example is when, after visiting/killing Håkan at the hospital, Eli comes to Oskar and joins him in bed. Naked. Later, Oskar proposes a blood-sharing with Eli, a fluid exchange. Later still, an excited, curious and presumably just-prior-to-pubescent Oskar catches a surreptitious and confusing glimpse of Eli’s mutilated, un-sexed crotch. Near the end of the film, Eli and Oskar kiss, an otherwise cute moment somewhat marred by the post-feeding clots of blood shared between their lips. What all these examples do is bring up areas of sexual thought with which most “normal” audience members are uncomfortable: child sexuality, intersexuality (or non-sexuality, as the case may be here), sexual violence, puberty and menstruation. This uncomfort destabilizes the audience, allowing them to leave the refuge of old-hat horror themes and venture into less-charted thematic territory.
If the sex of vampirism is no longer found in the traditional places, if it no longer occupies such an essential space in terms of constructing and consuming the vampire monster, then where does the Horror come from? The audience of a narrative like Let the Right One In is forced, after looking in all the familiar places for the familiar sources of Horror and finding nontraditional and destabilizing ideas about taboo sexuality instead of comforting primal hetero(normative?) constructions, to focus on a different aspect of the vampire monster: transformation. King does not talk about the transformative power of vampires, but it is a very important part of their mythos, one that has to be considered both within the frame of sex and as a self-contained motif. Vampires are able to transform other people into vampires; they are able to reproduce. They are creatures of transformation themselves, having once been human beings before being changed. This transformation is almost always against the wishes of the transformee, which, in terms of the film, can be seen most explicitly in Virginia’s transformation into vampire after being attacked by Eli and surviving. The idea and ramifications of her transformation are so intolerable that she effectively commits suicide. This aspect of the vampire is what feeds the most poignant Horror of Let the Right One In. Vampiric transformation is horrible to the Western sensibility of individualism and free will; vampires can transform you, will transform you into one of them[6], and, worst of all, don’t care whether you like it. In fact, they may actually enjoy knowing that you don’t like it.
At the end of the movie, the audience is left with a question that inspires more Horror than a simple sexualized vampire tale would inspire, based on the idea of transformation: what has Oskar become? Possible answers only conjure yet more unsettling questions. Maybe he has become her new helper (á la Hårkan). But if so, was that Eli’s goal all along? Was all that grooming and encouragement for him to “hit back harder” just a script designed to turn him into someone capable of killing for her? Maybe he truly loves her, and maybe she truly loves him. But what would that mean in terms of their life together? Would she turn him into a vampire? Does this mean that he has gone insane? Basically, the true Horror of Let the Right One In comes from the fact that the audience knows that a transformation has occurred, and that transformation’s catalyst was a vampire, something inherently evil, but not what that transformation is. The idea that innocent-faced Oskar may have been manipulated and spiritually transmogrified against his will is heartbreaking. But that is what vampires are all about; their ability to transform their victims is far more terrible than their ability to orally/sexually penetrate: it is a rape of the soul.
Let the Right One In is art of a very high caliber. And as such, it leaves many of its most essential questions unanswered, or at least provides answers that are ambiguous enough to be open to interpretation. But from where its Horror comes is clear, albeit nontraditional, and it still fits King’s conception as the perfect mix of Terror and Revulsion. The audience has seen the carnage of what Eli’s physical and psychological capabilities (Revulsion), the memories very fresh from the pool scene just a cut before. The audience can imagine what Eli’s life has been like, what it will be like, what other atrocities they have not been shown (Terror). But the Horror comes when the audience sees the Terror and Revulsion levels meet: Oskar and Eli on a train bound for an uncertain and unsettling future, sharing “little kiss”es.
[1] All page number citations refer to:
King, Stephen. Danse Macabre. New York: Everest House, 1981. Print.
[2] It is worth noting here that Eli will be referred to mostly as “her” in this essay as per her dominant construction in the movie, as well as for reasons of clarity and flow.
[3] However, it would be narrow and naïve to assume that Let the Right One In’s audience is solely male. Horror’s consumer demographics seem to be changing in general, but LtROI in particular seems well suited to appeal to a very wide audience.
[4] See: the visual (and otherwise) importance placed on kissing, the numerous times Oskar’s mouth is the most dynamic thing in the frame, the shortest bully crony taunting through closed lips, Oskar and his mother brushing their teeth, etc.
[5] Discussed in Ain’t It Cool News’s interview with Let the Right One In novelist and screenwriter John Ajvide Lindqvist: http://www.aintitcool.com/node/38839
[6] (“Gooble gobble gooble gobble”)
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