Let The Right One In and There Are Monsters

A shamless bit of recycling today. We visited The Electric Cinema over the weekend for the final day of Birmingham's Flatpack festival to see Let The Right One In on the big screen. I've already posted a review of this wonderful film in the formative days of Tears All Over Town, but as I haven't much to talk about I thought I'd reprint my original thoughts here, with a few additional thoughts. But for those of you that have already read it, there's some additional material on the fabulous short movie that Flatpack had chosen to precede Let The Right One In...

Adapted from the best-selling novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist, Let the Right One In tracks the quiet movements of a small Swedish town, which, like the ever-present snowfall, remains stubbornly serene when talk of a serial killer spreads.
It’s the early eighties. In due spirit a Rubik’s Cube becomes the catalyst of a new friendship between pallid, scrawny schoolboy Oskar and the mysterious girl next door Eli, whose droopy eyes and quiet manners belie a sinister secret.
Eli has been 12 for a very long time.
And in all her veteran experience as a preteen she encourages Oskar to stand up against the school bullies whose daily abuse has become a banal ritual for him. If at times he copes with his new regime, at others he still needs a little help…
In terms of horror cinema, Let The Right One In is something else entirely; a story of who we allow inside our defences when the options are limted, and what we'd do for them to keep them there. It's a coming of age love story between two children who haven't been allowed to be children for some time.
The direction and cinematography is nothing short of sublime. It has the pacing and stillness you'd expect of a Scandinavian film, but it's also punctuated with some of the most shocking and visually arresting scenes that I've seen in a horror movie for some time. Some of the cliches of vampire myths are magnificently re-intepreted; the title plays on the vampire trope of having to be invited over the threshold (the price of doing so without invitation is both startling and poignant); sunlight is as deadly as it ever was, and again plays into another stunning visual; and feeding is a feral, brutal act, all the more shocking when it crashes into the spectral wintry stillness. There are numerous subtexts too, that bubble under the surface; places that the original source novel goes, some of which would simply be too contentious for even the more liberal European audience. There remain little traces of some extremely dark subject matter and are perhaps all the more disturbing for their ambiguity in the film.
Of course a movie that centres around two twelve year old children could all too easily stumble if the young actor's performances fell short, but Lina Leandersson and Kare Hedebrant are simply luminous. Both portray achingly sad children, forced to rely upon each other when all else in life fails them, emitting a chilling and utterly convincing innocence.
Let The Right One In is nothing short of stunning. In my opinion it's the best interpretation of the vampire story that I've ever seen. You should all see this. I guarantee you'll fall in love with it....

But before the main feature we were treated to a stunning little short movie, by Jay Dahl, entitled There Are Monsters. I'm often a little disappointed by short movies; often they're either too amatuerish, or simply have nothing original to offer. If you can't do something visually and creatively arresting in ten minutes, then I don't think you should bother.
Luckily Jay Dahl's little horror movie has one of the best jump-out-of-your-seat moments that I've seen in a long time. The entire assembled audience at The Electric left their chairs (and Art Deco sofas) at the required moment and it was a wonderful moment. But after that, Dahl delivered another more subtle scare, creating a protracted and deeply creepy scene of implied threat, and then proceeded to deliver a final jolt at the end of the ten minutes, leaving us all giggling in that shared, slightly embarrassed afterglow that happens so very infrequently these days.
After visiting Dahl's website, I noticed that There Are Monsters (which is a tease for a full-length feature) is available to watch on YouTube, so here it is in it's entirety. There are a fair few other movies at his website to watch too, so I recommend clicking here to see the rest of his work.
So if you can, turn off the lights and crank up the volume, then watch this...