How important is the "vampiric" matter?

For discussion of John Ajvide Lindqvist's novel Låt den rätte komma in
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Pissball
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How important is the "vampiric" matter?

Post by Pissball » Sun Dec 31, 2017 2:15 am

I can't remember if JAL wrote this story as a vampire genre specifically, or got the idea and then decided to used in a vampire story.
So I question to all ya people how significant is to you the vampire lore to LTROI, and to yourself.

I mean, the supernatural obviously is key in the story, this is indeed a horror fiction. But could it work if Eli was a different type of creature/entity, let's say: a ghost - a girl possesed by a demon - a succubus - a fallen angel, something in the middle of all that.. ?
I haven't read any fan fiction yet, but maybe some writer here thought about that ? Or maybe not, and instead, everybody went to study and expand the vampire lore. Which is good too, Im not bashing the vamps.

Im also wandering if the fact that LTROI falls inmediatly in the "vampire" category helps it to grown popularity, or it limited its apreciattion beyond that, the movie for instance is highly praised, even for those who start their reviews with "i don't like vampires but" or "i've never saw anything about vampires but" etc. The novel was published in 2004, before the Twilight disaster, but the movie was released in the 2008, in THE year of the twilight catastrophe, and it came out well, tryumphant in fact (since many praised LTROI as an "anti-twilight" and a salvation to vampire genre). But still, it stayed in the vampires category, mostly.

Let Me In f.e. was absolutley deluted in the average vampire films of the 2008-2012 hype, and nothing more. I think, that didn't helped the book (as a horror-thriller fiction it is), althought it actually made it more popular, it also killed it, by placing it in the "oh, another vampire story" area.

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Re: How important is the "vampiric" matter?

Post by SpartanAltego » Sun Dec 31, 2017 3:13 am

Vampirism mythology has a lot of merit to it that is tough to find in other commonly understood supernatural creatures. The tropes of vampirism are synchronized with the book's overarching patterns of loneliness, isolation, and being "other" to the rest of the world. The desire or want for violence to make one whole. If Eli was, say, a zombie instead of a vampire, then the entire story's context and contents would have to change to reflect that, because a zombie does not offer the same thematic and storytelling motifs that a vampire does. The framework of the story would need to be different. Same as if Eli were a werewolf, or a ghost.

So it could indeed work, but only with the understanding that it would not be Let the Right One In as we know it. As for limiting its popularity or accessibility, you're half-right. The supernatural genre is and has for a long time been considered a lower form of fiction by audiences and critics alike. Only in very, very recent years have enough knock-out entries of cinema and literature broken into the public scene to challenge that preconception.

That said, Let the Right One In is a dark story. We're talking about a book that contains, among other things, the attempted rape of a child by a zombie. Oskar putting his pissball on his nose and pretending to be a clown. The almost pulp, visceral nature of the story would limit its appeal to wider audiences just by that alone. It's actually pretty amazing to me that the book and films are so widely known, relatively speaking, as they are.
"The dark is patient, and it always wins. But its weakness lies in its strength: a single candle is enough to hold it at bay. Love is more than a candle. Love can ignite the stars." - Matthew Stover

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Re: How important is the "vampiric" matter?

Post by ltroifanatic » Sun Dec 31, 2017 3:39 am

As Spartan said you could do it but it would change a lot of the story.Maybe being associated with the crappy vampire movies of the past wouldn't help its popularity but I see it more of a romance than anything else.It just happens to have a vampire in it.However other people may see it differently.Reading the FF is a great way to read others views and takes on this masterpiece.
Please Oskar.Be me for a little while.

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Re: How important is the "vampiric" matter?

Post by dongregg » Sun Dec 31, 2017 5:35 am

I've read opinions here that say slotting it as horror genre misled and disappointed some viewers in the US. I think it was presented as a drama romance in Europe. Or something like that.

I warn people I show it to that it's more of an "art house" film -- a work of art.

But yeah, against all odds it has made its own path and is more widely known and appreciated than some lesser films that made a splash and then receded into obscurity.
“For drama to deepen, we must see the loneliness of the monster and the cunning of the innocent.”

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Re: How important is the "vampiric" matter?

Post by Pissball » Sun Dec 31, 2017 5:55 am

You guys made a point.

I forgot also about the sunlight, and the whole "letting in" regarded to the story.
Nevertheless, Eli isolation-lonliness is also product of her un-human condition, and as a "lost soul" concept is also associated to a spectre-ghost-like, and her interaction with disturbed people or her "fatal atraction" are also resembles to a demon-like, if we see Hakan as a condemned/death soul for it pedophilia, and the lady with cancer, as someone in the "list" to just die, then Eli appears as a "angel of death" or a collector of these souls (Oskar as a possible sociopath/murder) this doesn't apply to Virginia and Jocke tho, but it's true, it changes alot the story, or depends in which angle do you take. To me is a thriller with vampire elements, it is however about relantionships rather than just a romanthic/love story, at least the novel, the movie however goes more in a modern gothic depressive-romanthic tale, and it's also an art-house film, I guess very in the mood of swedish cinema, than classic horror.

As for the limited or not, I wasn't talking about a commercial succes or if it makes it more suitable for wider audience, that's basically what LMI tried to do. I agree with pulp horror elements of the book unpleasent, in fact I saw many readers over-reacted to that. Rather I was referring to a cult-following, and on how it limitates a story even in the horror genre.
The thing with vampire mytologhy is that is so well constructed that even thought it gives you elements to work with, it also locks you in it "rules" and its world. Other tropes/franchise like Evil Dead for example are much more refreshing, the "evil" is a deadite, a monster, a rapist tree, etc, in fact that's how Ash vs Evil Dead works, the "demonic" trope itself is much more open, you can create or use thousands of monsters/demons, mytholgy behind it, the bizarre religious cults, etc .
The other important problem is that vampires are way too popular and surpase the strict "horror" with the awfull glamorous-romantic-emo archetype of vampire for teen girls, that doesn't happend with the other sub genres.

To get to my point, let's pretend that LMI never existed and someone wants to re-adapt LTROI to screen, in the current years (2015-2017) now that vampires are pretty dead, could that happend ? Even if it is an independent production, as good as the swedish one, but in english. To be fair, many horror tropes are the same, people are already tired of zombies, and exorcism is absolutly burned, vampires had cycles many times, althought never existed a phenomenom like Twilight before (that's why I call it a catastrophe) so neither the countless Nosferatu/Draculas, Salem's Lot, The hunger, Interview With The Vampire, etc had to deal with it.

Saying this, I did enjoy a lot all the vampiric elements presented in the novel, that made it more horrorific, that many fans,readers or critics actually disliked.

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Re: How important is the "vampiric" matter?

Post by gattoparde59 » Sun Dec 31, 2017 12:55 pm

I have a history with vampire stories going back to my childhood so I guess it is not accidental that I was attracted to this story. Vampire stories have the disadvantage of being campy stuff where the creators are not really trying very hard, but it did provide something familiar with John Lindqvist to build upon. Where he departed from the campy elements of vampire lore was asking a question something like "so you are a vampire, what does that mean exactly?" He did the same thing with zombies in Handling the Undead."

Why vampires? There is an element of mystery to the character of Eli. Vampires at least look human, but are they really human? Look at Metoo's signature on his posts. This element of the vampire is a springboard to other themes like trust and friendships for people who have major problems with trust and friendships.

This was described by critics as a tale of friendship told from the point of view of children and In retrospect I think this attracted me to the movie, sight unseen.

I'll break open the story and tell you what is there. Then, like the others that have fallen out onto the sand, I will finish with it, and the wind will take it away.

Nisa

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Re: How important is the "vampiric" matter?

Post by metoo » Sun Dec 31, 2017 6:34 pm

Personally, I don't think Eli being a vampire is very important. He could have been anything supernatural, as long as it made him an utter outcast without being too repulsive for Oskar to plausibly approach him.

On a different track, although a related one:

I think Sauvin intended the girl in his Shadows Whispering in the Night to be a vampire akin to Eli, but he didn't make that explicit or even hinted at it in the story. Therefore, I made up my own idea of her nature: she is feeding on people, and in the process kills her victims, but she doesn't consume their blood. Instead she sucks their "essence of life" out of them, perhaps similar to the dementors of the Harry Potter universe. And the more tainted the soul, the tastier (think matured cheese) and more nourishing, which is why she made some extra efforts to catch Mr Frankenbeans... :twisted: :mrgreen:

gattoparde59 wrote:
Sun Dec 31, 2017 12:55 pm
Look at Metoo's signature on his posts.
But from the beginning Eli was just Eli. Nothing. Anything. And he is still a mystery to me. John Ajvide Lindqvist

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Re: How important is the "vampiric" matter?

Post by sauvin » Sun Dec 31, 2017 8:57 pm

metoo wrote:
Sun Dec 31, 2017 6:34 pm
Personally, I don't think Eli being a vampire is very important. He could have been anything supernatural, as long as it made him an utter outcast without being too repulsive for Oskar to plausibly approach him.

On a different track, although a related one:

I think Sauvin intended the girl in his Shadows Whispering in the Night to be a vampire akin to Eli, but he didn't make that explicit or even hinted at it in the story. Therefore, I made up my own idea of her nature: she is feeding on people, and in the process kills her victims, but she doesn't consume their blood. Instead she sucks their "essence of life" out of them, perhaps similar to the dementors of the Harry Potter universe. And the more tainted the soul, the tastier (think matured cheese) and more nourishing, which is why she made some extra efforts to catch Mr Frankenbeans... :twisted: :mrgreen:

gattoparde59 wrote:
Sun Dec 31, 2017 12:55 pm
Look at Metoo's signature on his posts.
I left her "real" nature unspecified in order to leave myself some wriggle room in case I find I've written myself into a corner. For all I know or care, she has to eat human livers, pineal glands or bone marrow. If I've slipped and stuck in some reference to specifically needing blood, then I slipped.

It's not mandatory, but (good) horror fiction in the contemporary Anglosphere tends to classify as derivations, variants or blendings of a few "basic" archetypes that've remained remarkably durable over the past dozen decades or so: the ghost, the vampire, the werewolf, the Frankenstein monster (I believe) and the Thing with No Name. In their very essences (and in my own words), they are, respectively: a resounding echo of unresolved moral imbalance, a mooch, an uncontrollable rage, the disenfranchised product of careless scientific investigation or application of technology (think Thalidomide), and whatever it is that goes bump in the night without setting off the burglar alarms. This short-list pandemonium is a kind of catch-22: we think in such terms because they already exist and serve us well, and they've served us well because we already thought more or less in such terms probably long before they were formally attested.

LTROI is what it is, and it flowed how it flowed. Girl and boy meet, they run over a few bumps while forging a relationship, boy gets in serious trouble, girl bails him out and whisks him safely away. Changing the flow would probably impact the chemistry we cherish, and we've commented often enough that said chemistry is so very freaking delicate. Change the form of Eli's monstrosity, change the flow.

If Eli were a werewolf, would she still have been "twelve, more or less"? Outside the Underworld franchise, I'm not used to thinking of werewolves as being immortal. Also, as far as I know, werewolves transmogrify only under a full moon, leaving it up to the author to scratch his head raw trying to figure out a plausible way for the monster to pop up unexpectedly in the basement clubhouse, in the middle of Oskar's living room or - serendipitously enough - just in time to take care of business at the pool. In any event, under most canons, werewolves lose their humanity in toto when they Become, meaning, they'll attack anything with a pulse, Oskar included.

If Eli were a ghost, the playing field is a bit more open. Some works of fiction do have ghosts taking physical form (e.g.,
Ghost Story), but they don't generally need to eat anything, and what does a ghost have to fear from the local constabulary or armed peasantry? Ghosts also don't (usually) get lonely, and neither do they (usually) fall in love. Whisking Oskar safely away just might mean he's the one who rides the train in a box, not her. The auctorial legermain needed here is that ghosts are usually creatures bent on some kind of horrific revenge against specific people, or creatures bound to some particular place by some unspeakable curse, so Eli won't be arriving in a U-haul and leaving in a taxi to terrorise the town just six or seven ZIP codes away.

Hollywood has been doing some pretty funky variations on the Frankenstein monster concept, and this field is even more widely open. Two characters that come immediately to mind are Dren (Splice) and Ava (Ex Machina). These two recent exemplars of the subgenre actually obey (more or less) the blueprint Shelley laid down in that the monster "grew up" sensitive, articulate and companionable before circumstances turned them hard and bitter; in Dren's case, puberty collided with amphibian genes, and in Ava's case, the dream of freedom came within grasp. Being horror fiction with roots in the far past, I suppose a qabal of witches could have conjured up something similar. These creatures can be insanely strong and (for the boltneck crowd) insanely repulsive, and so fit most of the bill for a different kind of Eliformity. The problem I'm having with this kind of creature is in arc: they tend to have definite pasts, definite transition periods and strongly defined futures. Things change; Frankenstein monsters change; my Eli doesn't.

And zombies? Like, totally, man! They used to be mall rats, and now I think they hang out mostly on Facebook when they're not busy accessorising at Walmart.

I shouldn't be so flip where Things with No Names are concerned. The playing field here for crafting a new and ostensibly improved Eli is wider even still. There are no rules because the Unnamed have no definite form. Zombies (in my mind) fall into this category because once they've passed on, they need no names, addresses or phone numbers, they just need a bullet in the brain. Other Nameless things include things like the Blob (never really did figure out what that critter's deal was). The thing about striking up a romance between a preteen boy and a.. um.. thing.. well, romances generally arise between two creatures where both are more or less human. I couldn't see myself at any age spending quality time in the back seat of a '67 Chevy steaming up the windows with a Blob, and zombies, well, know what? There just ain't enough Right-Guard, Lavoris and Chanel Number 5 to cover up the foetor or enough pancake makeup to keep the maggots out of sight.

The "more or less human" epithet is crucial. Things with No Name are something Other; they might be eldritch, saprophytic or caustic mists from a window into Dimension X, but what Oskar fell in love with long before he discovered her secret was most definitely another human. In the novel, it was a boy (and it took him a few pages to get used to the idea), and in the movie, a powerfully attractive dark-haired girl with really pretty eyes. She had a human child's playfulness and a human being's capacity for loyalty and protectiveness. Things that are Other do not generally subscribe to human social values, and Oskar would have been very, very quick to pick up on that.

I suppose any of these archetypes could be used, but I'm thinking that Oskar would have had to have known her for a while before being turned into something other than completely human because my puny little socially disadvantaged head just can't come up with a way for the romance to evolve unless Oskar either perceives some surviving humanity, or just winds up clinging to the illusion of it.

Truthfully, what JAL has done with the vampire archetype blows my mind. He turned a rich, bloodthirsty Wallachian voivode whose mailing address hadn't changed in five centuries into an impoverished and very reachable waif - and, if I'm not mistaken, did so as an afterthought.
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Re: How important is the "vampiric" matter?

Post by artredfield1999 » Sun Jan 07, 2018 7:14 pm

I think the vampire elements of the story are one of the most important things in "Let The Right One In", even if the "vampire" doesn't consider like one herself/himself.
Last edited by artredfield1999 on Sun Aug 19, 2018 9:03 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: How important is the "vampiric" matter?

Post by dongregg » Sun Jan 07, 2018 7:49 pm

artredfield1999 wrote:
Sun Jan 07, 2018 7:14 pm
I think the vampire elements of the story are one of the most important things in "Let The Right One In", even if the "vampire" doesn't considered like one herself/himself.
Yes. And while I can subscribe to the notion that the film (and no less so the novel) is a relationship story with a vampire in it, Eli has to be scarily "other" in the beginning. Neither of them are good candidates at first for a loving and caring relationship, yet events and their yearning to break through their loneliness propel the story and has us rooting for them. :wub:
“For drama to deepen, we must see the loneliness of the monster and the cunning of the innocent.”

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