Let the Right One in

Vampires have never been so popular. Amid the glut 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. Let the Right One In 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 new arrival Eli, who lives 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. What does Eli want from Oskar?

While Let the Right One In is startlingly original, it nevertheless couldn't have existed without the near century of vampire cinema that preceded it Acclaimed horror writer 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 Martin (I 977) and Near Dark (1987) and how vampire mythology adapts itself to the modern world.

Anne Billson, who was born in Southport in 1954, is a film critic, journalist and photographer. Her books include a study of John Carpenter's The Thing and three horror novels: Suckers, Stiff Lips and The Ex, and in 1993 she was named one of Granta's 'Best Young British Novelists'. She has lived in London, Tokyo and Paris, and now lives in Brussels.