Let the Right One in, 2008

This could well be the most 'grown up' horror we have watched thus far on Friday Horror Night. It's a little film which is basically a love story. A young, very quirky looking boy who doesn't have many friends and is being bullied at school, makes friends with a strange little girl. You know things are not right when her Dad goes off into the woods with a frightening bit of kit that includes a container for collecting blood! This film contains violence... and a vampire, but doesn't go to excess with either. It's more about the relationship between the 2 young people and what they mean to each other. I didn't once jump, or laugh, but I did really enjoy this film. It is very different from anything else we've watched so was really refreshing. I did feel a bit cold though as it's set in one very cold, snowy town in Sweden brrrr.

SECOND OPINION: Certain plot facts are implicit in a film of this type. We know it's a horror, and if we've read anything about the movie at all, we also figure pretty early on that the strange young girl is a blood sucking vampire. But add to those facts that the girl is a straight-down-the-middle, Bram Stokeresque vampire with all the contagious, wall crawling, flying and light allergy shennanigans, and one begins to wonder what's going on. Even Blade mixed the folklore up a little! Well the focus isn't vampires, not really. It's a love-story borrowing more from Romeo & Juliet that Hammer Horror. The young boy is something of an outcast who daydreams of teaching the bullies at school a lesson, the young girl is similarly lost, but for very different reasons. How sweet. But if this film has a problem, and unfortunately I think it has, it's that the girl truly likes the boy, so he's never in danger... unlike everyone else. Since we don't care about everyone else, there's no tension where I thought there could and should have been.

So what do we have. A melodically paced boy meets girl vampire movie, which is wonderfully shot and acted, but at it's scariest, nothing more than unsettling.