![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Vampire Romance
Tuesday, November 18th, 2008 07:45 pmWith "Twilight" coming put this week, I've been working to resist the lure of the books and the pallid, pouting stars of the movie. Your brain cells!, they alternately hiss and purr, Feed us with them! Our sparkles demand power, attention, and sweet, sweet BRAAAAINNNSSS! I'm over-saturated with images of apples in hands, chess pieces, flowing pieces of red cloth, and high cheekbones. I feel a little like Ulysses instructing his men to tie him to the mast and row him past the sirens as I think of the inevitable entertainment that these books might bring me. But I haven't read them, and don't plan to. How, exactly, have I managed to keep my brains cells, my readerly dignity, and my sanity?
By watching another vampire romance movie: Let the Right One In, a Swedish horror/real life movie, that truly moved and entertained me, and gave me hope that there's non-cliched (and non-sparkly) life left in the vampire movie genre. (Check out the trailer here, at Apple. There are also a lot of fast-disappearing clips on Youtube, some with subtitles and some without.) The plot of the film is as simple as it gets: Boy meets girl (vampire). (Girl) Vampire meets boy. Boy, who reads a lot, quickly realizes that girl is, in fact, a vampire, but cannot bring himself to leave her. Vampire saves Boy, but not entirely in the way you might expect. The beauty of this film comes from the tremendous acting skills of the two lead characters, the disquietingly simple special effects and judicious use of make-up, the eerily silent setting of the Swedish winter, and the loving approach the filmmakers have to everyday life (at one point, the main character and his mother have a tooth-brushing contest, and it's the sweetest darn thing I've ever seen.) This is a vampire attempting to live life, or as close as she will get to it, since she's stuck at 12 years old forever. And while it's not clear at first why she might want to live life, it becomes more and more clear as the story goes on and her emotional investment in the main character begins to get the better of her. At one point, she asks him if she would love him if she were not a girl, and naively he answers 'yes', not realizing that the unspoken question she's asking him is, would you still love me if I were a monster? The answer, not surprisingly, is that she's not as much of a monster as humans are, and that he does love her. How this unfolds, however, is surprising and beautiful.
This film shows, in no uncertain terms, what happens to vampire who enter a human space without permission. This sequence was hard to watch, but utterly and completely fascinating. It was the sort of gritty scare that I sometimes wish "Buffy" had had more of. Fairy tale rules start sounding arbitrary and stupid when they're used as plot devices; when you see that there are rules for a reason, that's when the story heats up.
This is not a "normal" horror movie, and the pacing is very different from most Hollywood blockbusters. But the investment pays off in so many ways--not the least of which is watching a vampire girl who kick Edward Cullen's sparkly ass seven ways from Sunday finding her place in the world. This is highly recommended, to horror fans and non-horror fans alike.
By watching another vampire romance movie: Let the Right One In, a Swedish horror/real life movie, that truly moved and entertained me, and gave me hope that there's non-cliched (and non-sparkly) life left in the vampire movie genre. (Check out the trailer here, at Apple. There are also a lot of fast-disappearing clips on Youtube, some with subtitles and some without.) The plot of the film is as simple as it gets: Boy meets girl (vampire). (Girl) Vampire meets boy. Boy, who reads a lot, quickly realizes that girl is, in fact, a vampire, but cannot bring himself to leave her. Vampire saves Boy, but not entirely in the way you might expect. The beauty of this film comes from the tremendous acting skills of the two lead characters, the disquietingly simple special effects and judicious use of make-up, the eerily silent setting of the Swedish winter, and the loving approach the filmmakers have to everyday life (at one point, the main character and his mother have a tooth-brushing contest, and it's the sweetest darn thing I've ever seen.) This is a vampire attempting to live life, or as close as she will get to it, since she's stuck at 12 years old forever. And while it's not clear at first why she might want to live life, it becomes more and more clear as the story goes on and her emotional investment in the main character begins to get the better of her. At one point, she asks him if she would love him if she were not a girl, and naively he answers 'yes', not realizing that the unspoken question she's asking him is, would you still love me if I were a monster? The answer, not surprisingly, is that she's not as much of a monster as humans are, and that he does love her. How this unfolds, however, is surprising and beautiful.
This film shows, in no uncertain terms, what happens to vampire who enter a human space without permission. This sequence was hard to watch, but utterly and completely fascinating. It was the sort of gritty scare that I sometimes wish "Buffy" had had more of. Fairy tale rules start sounding arbitrary and stupid when they're used as plot devices; when you see that there are rules for a reason, that's when the story heats up.
This is not a "normal" horror movie, and the pacing is very different from most Hollywood blockbusters. But the investment pays off in so many ways--not the least of which is watching a vampire girl who kick Edward Cullen's sparkly ass seven ways from Sunday finding her place in the world. This is highly recommended, to horror fans and non-horror fans alike.
