Demythologizing Vampires
In one sense, Let the Right One In exists thematically as an example of literary deconstruction. The portrayal of Eli is one which forces the viewer to question everything that film, especially, has taught them about what it means to be a vampire. Ironically, the film’s release coincided with a much more commercially successful movie that did just the opposite. While Twilight actually managed to make the vampire myth somehow even more romantic with its impossibly beautiful cast of sparkly vampires sitting at the popular kids’ table, Let the Right One In was graphically revealing the grisly consequences of having to survive only on blood and of the toll taken on vampires who break mythic rules like entering a home without first being invited in.
Bullying
Take away the vampire element of the story completely and what is left is a still powerful cinematic portrait of the psychological potential for massive violence to explode as a result of school bullying being ignored. Oskar is relentlessly and mercilessly bullied by a group of boys and the impact of that experience is inextricably connected to his developing relationship with the weird new neighbor girl. One way to interpret the film, in fact, is to see Eli as a metaphor for an assault rifle. Pushed to the limitations that any child should be forced to accept and receiving no help from the adults at the school who cannot justify being ignorant of the bullying, Oskar’s story inevitably erupts in a bloodbath leaving his tormenters in separate pieces. While it is Eli who is responsible for the damage rather than Oskar, the trek of the narrative becomes an imperfect metaphor for those attacks against their students either planned or actually carried out by those who perceive their gun-toting madness as justifiable revenge for their own history of being bullied.
Gender
Although the details of this theme are not explored in as much detail as in the book, it is still presented as important. The novel contains an extensive flashback that explains how Eli started out as a young boy before becoming the girl that Oskar falls for. The film more allusively touches upon this them first by having Eli ask Oskar how he would feel about her (he wants her to be his girlfriend) if she were a boy and then later in a scene in Oskar briefly spies on her changing clothes and get a quick flash of her pubic area which seems to indicate (and is fully explained in the novel) that Eli was the victim of an emasculation of her genitalia. What is presented without ambiguity in the novel is therefore made more ambiguous in the film, raising the question of what Eli’s actual biological gender is and, of course, also thereby raising the question of whether biological gender is determinant.
