Vampires seem to be making a comeback these days, and not just at night and from the grave. In broad daylight you see sleek sets of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight novels everywhere, and the first of no doubt many movies based on the series opened at the end of last year.* But vampires haven't really been away. From Dracula to Buffy they have sustained an extraordinary attendance record among human communities, have never stopped being almost everyone's favourite form of the undead. There's a sly evocation of this tradition in Tomas Alfredson's alternately creepy and mildly sentimental Let the Right One In when Oscar, a lonely bullied boy with morbid tastes in local history (he keeps a file of newspaper cuttings with details of all the murders he can find, and he finds a lot), finally asks his friend Eli whether she is a vampire.

LRB 14 May 2009 | PDF Download