Let the right one in

The Sweedish horror film 'Let the right one in'(2008) directed by Tomas Alfredson, is an adaption of a Sweedish, gothic horror book written by John Ajvide Lindqvist. Although the film was given a small budget of £4 million to produce, the film has more than trbeled this amount to date and has become very successful. There are plans to recreate the film in America but development has not started yet. The film is set in the 1980's in a small town outside the capital city Stockholm, and was film in the harsh winter as snow is seen in every outside shot. The main characters are a young boy called Oskar who is twelve years old and lives in a block of flats with his mother, he is harshly bullied at his school by class mates and this immidiatly makes us feel sympathy for him. He meets a girl named Eli who is of similar age and they meet outside the flat. Eli lives with her father who we immediatly discover is a viscious murder and performs inhuman tortuers on his victims. We later find that Eli is a vampire and feeds on blood. Oskar is unaware of this as she decides not to tell him what she really is. They immidiatly become friends.
The director uses many different sounds to show emotion and feelings within the characters. Sound is used to build tension in key parts of the film, they use recognisable sounds such as the opening of doors and creeks in the floor to let you know someone is there. Music is also used to build tension and we are introduced to loud sudden music just before a killing. The repetition of this makes the audience know when a dramatic scene is about to take place.
There is a lot of variety in the camera work of this film, There are close ups to show emotion of the character when a significant part of the has happened such as a murder. We then see long to show an incident happening, eg:When the body is found in the frozen lake. This is to give the audience an all round picture of what is happening and the location. We also see panning shots when someone enters a room or a new location is being shown, this is also to show the audience the surroundings. We see over the shoulder shots when a conversation is taking place and also close up of faces are used to show the charcters emotion.
The lighting in the film is also very important, the dark nights add to the horror as night is assosiated with that genre. The lighting we see in the houses are artificial and are usually dimmed low. The day shots that are filmed in the natural light are shown to be very bright, the snow and the pure white sky add to this so artificial lights were not needed in those scenes.
Claude-Levi Strauss and his theories played a big impact in 'Let the right on in'. It was his idea to add binary opposites into films such as Boy versus Girl, good versus evil, young versus old. Binary opposites are shown throughout in this film. We first see a common opposite of boy versus girl, through Oskar and Eli. We see innocent versus bully when Oskar gets bullied at school. There is also good versus evil, which is shown when Oskar fights back against the bullies and with the murser victims. We also see human versus non-human in the freindship of Oskar and Eli, we see how they can both help eachother and learn from eachother.