“When I first reencountered Dracula in grad school, after I had moved through my feelings of revulsion and anger about the text, I started really thinking about the role of femininity in these characters that Bram Stoker wrote,” says poet Chase Berggrun. Stoker, by many scholars believed to be a closeted gay man, makes Dracula, both novel and character, a personification of these fears both of the enforcement of gender roles and also the consequences of shirking them. This manifests both in its discomfort with the monstrous women who shirk Victorian gender roles but also in the homoerotic acts of seduction carried out by its title character. While it is perhaps better known for its many adaptations and the tropes it inspired in future takes on the character, Dracula is a novel bursting with anxiety about gender and sexuality. While it certainly didn’t invent the vampire, Bram Stoker’s 1897 gothic novel Dracula undeniably defined much of our contemporary understanding both for its title character but also for all his blood-sucking ilk. In a way, we see Eli in conversation with one of the longest running themes in vampiric narratives. In some ways, this helps them in their hunts for human prey, but it’s hard to watch their interactions with Oskar and the other characters and not see that Eli exists outside a gender binary. While they do insist to Oskar that they aren’t a girl, Eli spends most of the film dressed as one and letting the world think of them as one. Castration, of course, does not negate male identity, but Eli seems to comfortably shirk their masculinity. And what struck me, being a closeted trans girl with lots of gender feelings rumbling around in her head, was just how intentionally fluid and undefined Eli’s gender is. Where the American version of this story featured what was clearly a heterosexual relationship between a boy and cisgender vampire, Let the Right One In is inescapably queer. During a particularly vulnerable moment between boy and vampire, Oskar and Eli this time around, Eli disrobes and reveals a snaking castration scar across their pubis. If anything, outside of some slick cinematography, Reeves’s take maybe adheres a bit too close to the source material to justify that it needed to exist in the first place. On first glance, the two movies are remarkably similar. It would be almost five years later, during a Taco Bell-fueled late-night horror movie marathon with my brother that I finally saw Let the Right One In, the original 2008 Swedish film. Nothing truly exciting, but it was a well shot vampire tale that I enjoyed and quickly forgot. I was aware at the time that this was not the first version of this tale of love and friendship between a young boy, Owen, and a centuries-old adolescent vampire girl, Abby, but I had loved Reeve’s other monster movie Cloverfield, so I ignored the fact there was supposedly a better version of it lying out there.

And this is how I first came across Matt Reeves’s 2011 film Let Me In. Teenage me was exactly the kind of person that slick Americanized remakes were made for. I did many embarrassing things in my teen years, but none may be more cringeworthy than the fact that I used to watch remakes before originals.

The Autostraddle Encyclopedia of Lesbian Cinema.LGBTQ Television Guide: What To Watch Now.

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