Abstract
This article suggests that contemporary horror film responds to societal currents beyond the film industry, perhaps in particular in smaller cinema nations like Sweden without an established tradition of horror film. It explores the Swedish vampire film Let the Right One In (2008) as a unique contribution to a socially committed phase of the genre. It argues that the film can be read as an allegory of a declining Swedish national folkhem, and that the suburb stands for a miniature Sweden and the vampire a figure of the political, social, and demographic transformations characterizing Sweden since the 1980s. The vampire is primarily discussed as a contradictory figure of national anxieties in a postindustrial and multicultural age, both threatening the traditional community with its racial and androgynous otherness and infusing it with new energy.
© 2013 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co.