These days it takes a very special vampire movie to stand out. Like
Twilight
, the Swedish film
Let the Right One In
is a love story between a human and a vampire but there the resemblance ends.
is not a romantic fantasy but combines the supernatural with social realism. Set on a housing estate in the suburbs of Stockholm in the early 1980s, it's the story of Oskar, a lonely, bullied child, who makes friends with Eli, the girl in the next apartment. 'Oskar, I'm not a girl, ' she tells him and she's not kidding. They forge a relationship which is oddly innocent yet disturbing, two outsiders against the rest of the world. But one of these outsiders is, effectively, a serial killer. While
is startlingly original, it nevertheless couldn't have existed without the near century of vampire cinema that preceded it. Acclaimed film critic and horror novelist Anne Billson looks at how it has drawn from, and wrung new twists on, such classics as
Nosferatu
(1922), how vampire cinema has already flirted with social realism in films like
Near Dark
(1987) and how vampire mythology adapts itself to the modern world.