Sin #7: Vampire Weekends

The playground outside Oskar’s home is cold and damp, half covered in the punishing white snow of Sweden and harboring a dark secret. Apparently there’s a strange man murdering people on the area but, isn’t it strange that he’s more interested in storing the blood he drains from his victims than actually killing them?

Oskar is lonely, lost in his own thoughts. He’s heard about the murders but doesn’t really pay much attention. One day, he meets a strange girl named Eli on the playground who doesn’t want to be his friend. Oskar is intrigued, he wants to learn more about her. After all, she’s also harboring a dark secret.

“Let the Right One In” is one of the best vampire movies in a long time, and one of the few, lately, that actually deals with real vampires (taking a stab, pun intended, at “Twilight”). There’s nothing romantic about Eli’s condition and nothing predictable about her relationship with Oskar, who truly loves her.

With the popularity of Stephanie Meyer’s bland and obnoxious series, it seems the market is now full of “vampire” stories. The HBO series “True Blood” is both sexy at atmospheric but shallow, lacking in character depth, resulting in a show that is, dare I say it, toothless. It almost feels like an awkward marriage between Anne Rice’s vicious mythology and Meyer’s teen spirit.

Another mediocre attempt came last year with Korean director Park Chan Wook. His movie “Thirst” follows a good priest to Africa where he contracts a strange and mortal disease. He survives through a blood transfusion but becomes a vampire. Predictably, “Thirst” also evolves into a love story, well, a masochistic and dark relationship develops, I should say.

The problem with Wook’s movie is that it becomes predictable; even its final tortured sequence lacks the power of the climax of “Oldboy” or “Lady Vengeance”, tragic morality plays that surpassed our expectations and rose above their genres.

Vampirism has always been one of the most fascinating conditions of the horror genre. I, however, don’t see the glamour or the lyrical romanticism; they are haunted, menacing creatures, cold existential lepers of society. Without a doubt, they could have the Cullen family for breakfast, lunch or dinner.