Kare Hedebrant is Oskar, a lonely 12-year-old misfit boy who befriends a vampire who lives next door.

Magnet Releasing.

Halloween has passed, but vampires are still very big. Twilight, about a teenage vampire in love, opened to smash business a couple of weeks ago.

Now, from Sweden, comes Let the Right One In, about a vampire girl who befriends a lonely 12-year-old boy on the outskirts of snowy Stockholm and cautiously lets him in on her secret.

Director Tomas Alfredson’s film has its grisly and gruesome moments, with quite a lot of blood letting. There are a couple of creepily ominous times when suspense is built up. Yet the film is not the really terrifically scary vampire movie one might have hoped for.

Young Oskar (Kare Hedebrant) is a lonely boy who is constantly bullied at school, taking the punishment and taunts of his classmates stoically. Nevertheless, he’s seething inside, apparent from his scrapbook, which is filled with newspaper accounts of gruesome murders.

Oskar seems ripe for something a little unusual and he finds what his heart desires when a pale girl moves into the apartment next door with a man Oskar believes is her father. He attempts to strike up a friendship, but Eli (Lina Leandersson) cautions, “Just so you know, I can’t be your friend.” Nevertheless, Oskar is persistent, meeting her on the playground jungle gym outside the apartment building after dark. Eli comes out only after dark because she’s a vampire. Luckily for her, because it’s winter in Sweden, daylight is limited.

Eli is even more of a misfit than Oskar, of course. She can’t eat sweets. She tells him that she’s 12 “more or less.” And she smells funny when she hasn’t had her dose of blood.

It takes some time for Oskar to realize Eli’s secret, while the audience is in on it pretty early on when the man she is living with turns out to be her slave whose nighttime forays are attempts to get blood for Eli, who looks wan and tired until she can get a fresh supply. However, he’s not very good at his task. At one point he captures a man in the woods, strings him up and slits his throat, resulting in the film’s most graphic and grisly scene. But things do not go as well as planned, or with another later attempt at murder in a high school locker room.

Now desperate for her blood fix, Eli takes matters into her own hands, jumping victims in dark places and coming away with a mouth covered in blood. Some of this is creepily done, especially what with Eli demonstrating that she can fly and can crawl up the side of a building. Oskar, rather than being horrified by any of this, is fascinated by his friend who has unlikely powers. He even becomes an accomplice to one of her deeds.

Yet, like the boy vampire of Twilight, Eli tries vainly to hold back from biting Oskar, realizing that one bite would turn him into a vampire, too. One might have hoped that their relationship would have created more of a sense of passion in the film, as it did in Twilight, except that the young actors have little screen chemistry and play their characters matter of factly. Thus, the horror is muted and what could have been a good scare in the dark becomes more of a curiosity.

***

Let the Right One In

Starring: Kare Hedebrant, Lina Leandersson. In Swedish with English subtitles.

Rated: R, contains violence, profanity.

mjanuson@projo.com