The Most Terrifying Vampire Movie Isn’t From America

Let the Right One In follows young Oskar, a quiet kid who lives with his mother in a Swedish suburb in the early 1980s. Like so many school children, Oskar is the victim of constant bullying from his classmates and is subjected to their cruel torment and humiliation on a daily basis.

Little does he realize that the solution to his problem has just moved into the apartment next door, taking the form of a girl his age.

Eli moves next to Oskar with an older man, presenting a relationship that is suspect from the very start. Let the Right One In shows Eli’s apparent caregiver, Hakan, attacking and killing pedestrians nearby and draining off their blood. It’s soon revealed that the man is doing this for the young Eli, who is a vampire.

As Let the Right One begins to take shape, Oskar and Eli form a unique bond. Eli encourages her bullied neighbor to stand up for himself, and Oskar’s confidence and self-worth begins to rise.

But the true relationship between Eli and Hakan shows the darker side of what a relationship with a vampire truly entails as Oskar begins to become dangerously close to her.

Based on the 2004 novel of the same name by John Aivide Lindqvist, Let the Right One In exemplifies all of the characteristics of a modern gothic horror film, capturing the tragic consequences of a mortal falling in love with someone cursed with eternal life.

Though violent at times, the film’s overall tone is overshadowed by the morose more than the macabre.

Despite this, Let the Right One In still manages to give audiences some of the most horrific vampire attack sequences in recent years. As the primary antagonists are Oskar’s school-aged bullies, their ultimate punishment is even more brutal given that they are only children.

Let the Right One In was scored by Swedish composer Johan Soderqvist and performed by the Slovak National Symphony Orchestra.

The chilling stringed instrumentation gives additional chilling layers to the Thomas Alfredson-directed feature that it otherwise would not have and serves it well in giving horror fans a well-balanced production of emotional and physical terror.

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In 2010, a joint effort between Exclusive Media Group and U.K. based Hammer Films remade Let the Right One In, largely filming in Los Alamos, New Mexico.

Retitled Let Me In, the movie was criticized by some as being too close to the original Swedish film instead of taking advantage of the opportunity to be its own adaptation of the original source material. That being said, the U.S. film did avoid becoming a box office bomb, generating nearly $30 million in ticket sales over a $20 million production budget.

You can stream Let the Right One In for free with the Roku Channel.