Keywords

Introduction

He had been expecting something… terrifying. Something in proportion to the horror he had experienced at the hospital. But this little bloody rag of a person didn’t look as if it could ever get up again, much less hurt anyone. It was only a child. A wounded child. (Lindqvist 2008, 438)

In 2008, audiences had two choices of vampire youths to see on screen. During the height of Twilight mania, just after the last book had been published, came the first film of the cinematic series. But another to film adaptation was also in limited release. Let the Right One In, based on John Ajvide Lindqvist’s 2004 novel, explored the pain of immortality as an eternal child. It may not have received the same amount of global attention as Stephanie Meyer’s work, but its influence on child vampire texts can still be felt today.

But Lindqvist’s work was not the first book to feature a child vampire. Stephen King’s ‘Salem’s Lot (1975) and Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (1976) established numerous tropes for the vampiric sub-genre that Lindqvist would later borrow. In the 1980s, works like S. P. Somtow’s Vampire Junction book series kept the vampire child in the spotlight, while on the silver screen the preadolescents were pushed to the side by teenage bloodsuckers. It wasn’t until the new millennium, with Lindqvist’s book, that vampire children were brought back into focus. Where Lindqvist was influenced by previous interpretations of vampire childhood, future filmmakers stepped away from many of the salacious elements that Lindqvist highlighted. Though the creatures themselves don’t often cast a reflection, the ever-changing landscape of vampire children media reflects how society has changed its views on children and monsters.

Immortal Children

Childhood is not from birth to a certain age and at a certain age The child is grown, and puts away childish things. Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies. (Meyers 2008, 2)

Breaking Dawn begins with a stanza from Pulitzer Prize winner Edna St. Vincent Millay. The poem “Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies” speaks of innocence and its loss as the transition point from hopeful youth to the harsh reality of adulthood. For consistency purposes, separating children from adulthood, an age range must be set. Medically, children are those at the ages between time of birth and adolescence (Elsevier 2013, 344). The World Health Organization defines adolescence between the ages of 10 to 19, give or take a few years based on how early one’s developmental stage begins or how late transition into adulthood (biologically speaking) ends. There are also cultural traditions, rites of passage, that mark the transition from childhood to adulthood. In the Jewish faith, the bar/bat mitzvah, celebrated at the age of 13, children’s participation within the community is increased, as is the level of responsibility. The Mexican (with influence from Spain and other Latin American countries) quinceanera, celebrated at the age of 15, marks a girl’s transition into womanhood, whether that being ready to marry (in more rural and historical situations), dress more maturely, and attend adult events. In this case, the simplified disambiguation of adolescence, teenagers, will be used to define the period of growth and its potential between the ages of 13 to 19. Therefore, all the vampire children analyzed will be 12 or younger. Also, due to the significant differences in audience, themes, and tone, this analysis will not cover texts aimed at kids, such as The Little Vampire or Young Dracula.

‘Salem’s Lot

The vampire child is mostly a modern invention. While there are Eastern European folklores of children beget by a vampire and a human known as dhampirs, it wasn’t until Stephen King’s ‘Salem’s Lot, published in 1975, that nascent Nosferatu were heavily featured in vampire tales. Set in the fictional town of Jerusalem Lot, Maine, ‘Salem’s Lot starts with the arrival of two new residents setting in motion a series of unfortunate events. Ben Mears spent much of his childhood in the Lot, but his memory of the town was scarred by a disturbing encounter at the ever-looming Marsten House. The mansion, which overlooks the Lot, has recently been purchased by the mysterious Richard Straker and his yet-seen business partner, Kurt Barlow. Mears’ return to the Lot coincides with a series of animal mutilations, missing persons, and murders, including a young boy named Ralphie Glick. After the disappearance of his brother Ralphie, Danny Glick falls into a state of shock and is hospitalized, diagnosed with an acute case of anemia. Two days later, he is found by a nurse, rejuvenated (presumably by the B12 injections) but dead. And it is Danny, not the vampire master Barlow, that begins the repopulation of ‘Salem’s Lot , first with the grave digger Mike Ryerson, next the baby Randy McDougall, and then his own mother, so on and so forth. Danny is a willing, and effective, lieutenant.

One of the reasons why Danny can procreate with such ease is his age. A 12-year-old boy, even pallid and with sharp teeth, does not spark an adult’s fight or flight response the same way a mysterious adult with the slightest peculiarity would. When Glick visits his friend, Mark Petrie, the young boy is saved from damnation because of his childhood imagination. He knows the rules (i.e., vampires requiring an invitation) from one of “his monster magazines, the one his mother was afraid might damage or warp him in some way” (King 2011, 368). It is his childlike impetuousness, “acting with no pause for thought or consideration (both would have come to an adult and both would have undone [them]),” that allows Mark to act fast and save himself from his school yard chum. Upon reflection, Mark realizes that the “difference between men and boys” is their belief in monsters under the bed (373). Unfortunately, for most of the residents of the Lot, once they realize that their impetus to protect even the most peculiar of children was an error in judgment, their fates are sealed.

There are numerous ways to be become a vampire in folklore from witchcraft to excommunication, suicide, murder, or just being born with red hair. But in ‘Salem’s Lot, it takes nothing more than a bite. While the doctor James Cody describes the vampire’s bite as sensual, even getting an erection while having the life sucked out of him, there is no exchanging fluids like that in Bram Stoker’s classic vampire tale, Dracula. When Dracula damns Mina, he does so by feeding on her first and then forces her to drink his own blood. Barlow commits a similar act with Father Callahan, placing his bloody palm upon the priest’s lips, but without the bite, this dark baptism does not result in his turning into a vampire. Unlike Bram Stoker’s Dracula and his perverse sexual evil, Barlow and his minions lack such deviant sexual overtones.

While vampires have often been the bogeyman for sexual taboos and King has never been one to veer away from kids and sex (i.e., It), with ‘Salem’s Lot, King “decided to largely jettison the sexual angle, feeling that in a society where… have become matters of public discussion, the sexual engine that powered much of Stoker’s book might have run out of gas” (King 1981, 76). This stands in stark contrast to the next major work of vampire fiction to feature a vampire child: Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire.

Interview with the Vampire

Where ‘Salem’s Lot is devoid of salacious content, 1976’s Interview with the Vampire is brimming with erotica. While the book doesn’t feature explicit sex, its overtones are carnal and wanton. Interview follows Louis de Pointe du Lac as he recounts his “after” life to a young journalist. The year was 1791 when 25-year-old Louis’ existence veered into darkness. First there was the death of his brother, then the guilt that followed, culminating in his welcoming of a vampire’s embrace. Lestat, an opportunistic vampire, turns Louis. But death does not assuage Louis of his morose behavior but merely amplifies it. He struggles with his new diet, going for long periods of time without a proper meal.

On one of Louis’ existential strolls to ward off nihilism, having wandered into a plague-ridden section of New Orleans, Louis hears the cries of a child. There he finds Claudia, a 5-year-old recently orphaned girl, still clinging to her mother’s corpse. Overcome by his hunger, Louis feeds on the severely weakened child, only to be interrupted by a jestful Lestat. Louis flees, unable to finish his meal. But the opportunistic Lestat sees potential in the little girl. She is the key to retaining Louis. Bled by Louis and fed by Lestat, Claudia becomes their daughter.

Unlike Louis, Claudia takes to her vampire condition with ease. While she shares with Lestat “the hunt, the seduction, the kill,” her relationship with Louis was both that of a father and daughter, lover and lover (Rice 2014, 101). Even after she learns that it was Louis who fed on her to the point of death, they remain beloveds, bound by their want, needs, and desire for each other and their fiery hatred toward Lestat. And it is with fire that the two seemingly escape from Lestat’s grasp, rushing from their burning abode (with Lestat still inside) to a Europe-bound ship. There, they search for others like them but find none. The two settle in Paris, content with each other’s companionship, that is, until they are found by another coven of vampires. Armand and his band of theatrical revenants are leery of Louis and Claudia, particularly the latter. It isn’t explicitly forbidden to turn one as young as she, but the choice is questionable. Why turn one “who can never grow, never be self-sufficient” (252)?

Claudia becomes aware of their suspicions, but also the strong connection between Armand and Louis. Fearing the loss of her “father” and “lover,” Claudia asks Louis to turn another for her. Unlike Danny Glick and the other young vampires in ‘Salem’s Lot, Claudia’s size prevents her from making a vampire of her own. The turning process in Interview with the Vampire is like that in Dracula; one must be drained to the point of death and then be fed vampire blood to complete the transition. Claudia is not strong enough for this process. Despite his own misgivings, Lestat turns a woman who herself lost a child, hoping that she will provide the guardianship Claudia so desperately needs, despite her strengths as a vampire and decades of knowledge. But this is all for naught, as the not-so-“dead” Lestat comes to Paris and reveals to the coven that it was Claudia who attempted to destroy him. She and Madeline are left to burn in the sun as punishment for breaking the singular sin of vampires: to kill another. With the death of Claudia, the last of Louis’ humanity burns away as well.

The 1994 motion picture adaptation of Interview with the Vampire made several changes to the book. There are visual differences between the characters as described in the novel; Louis’ loss at the beginning of the book is that of his wife and child rather than his brother, and the denouement does not include Louis and Armand traveling the world together for several decades. Critics also found that the “romantic” elements of The Vampire Chronicles like the tinges of sadomasochism, overtly part of Rice’s erotic novels but diffused here, have been subsumed by the overwhelming angst of Louis (Silver and Ursini 2010, 259). As for Claudia, she is aged up from five to ten (Kirsten Dunst as Claudia was eleven during filming). While still too young to effectively live by herself in nineteenth-century society, according to book Claudia, even “six more mortal years” might have been enough rather than being trapped in the body of such a young child (Rice, 261).

The 2022 television reimagining takes even more liberties with the source materials. The present-day story is the second interview between Louis and Daniel Malloy, decades after the initial inquiry from the book. The setting for the flashbacks to Louis’ early life as a vampire is changed to the late 1800s, early 1900s red-light district New Orleans, and Louis himself portrayed as a closeted black man. Claudia is also black and aged up to 14. In an interview for the official companion podcast for the show, actress Bailey Bass (who was 17 at the time of filming) explains how she chose to portray the “trials and tribulations of perpetual puberty” (Ekperigin 2022). As a fan of science, Bass took a literal approach to how a vampire so young would mature.

Her prefrontal cortex will never develop because growth is stopped when she is turned and the prefrontal cortex is what makes adults choose right from wrong. Before that, teenagers just go straight from emotion… so yes, she is maturing based on her experiences, but she will always be someone who acts on emotion first.

This differs heavily from the book Claudia. Louis notices the change in her, from child to woman. Claudia becomes inquisitive and noncompliant, cold and detached, calculative and demanding respect as an equal and not subservient. She becomes resistant to Lestat’s coercion and hording of knowledge. According to her, “the sleep of sixty-five years has ended!,” and she has become fully aware of her state of existence (Rice, 118).

While clearly not Rice’s intention, Bailey Bass’ portrayal does raise questions for other childlike vampires as to whether it is just their physical appearance that is stunted but also their emotional capacity. Timmy Valentine, from S.P. Somtow’s Vampire Junction offers us a complex answer to this question of maturity in a perpetual preteen.

Vampire Junction

Exactly what is a monster? Begin by assuming that the tale of horror, no matter how primitive, is allegorical by its very nature; that it is symbolic. Assume that it is talking to us, like a patient on a psychoanalyst’s couch, about one thing while it means another. (King 1981, 43)

More so than in King’s own fictional works does 1984’s Vampire Junction embody the ideas and concepts of King’s Danse Macabre. Vampire Junction, which follows the 2000-year-old vampire Timmy Valentine, turns the metaphorical literal. As Valentine asks his own psychoanalyst, while sitting on her couch, “What if some force, some image out of the collective unconscious, could become focused somehow, be born as a living entity?” (Somtow 1991,16). Valentine seeks out therapy as a source of understanding who he is, the anguish of his “terrible aloneness,” despite him being “seen by millions, worshiped by children, lusted after by adults,” as the 1980s current teen pop idol sensation (13, 17). Characters in the book switch between referring to Valentine as a teenager and a child, but his precise age of appearance is 12. Somtow emphasizes Valentine’s prepubescent state, on the cusp of adolescence. When picking up a few more pieces for his vast model train collection, the shop owner muses on his best customer, “How long had he been buying here? Three years? Strange, Phil thought, how he’s never grown taller. He seems frozen in the moment between childhood and puberty, like Peter Pan” (38). It is an odd dichotomy, the killer-train collector: “You see, I like model trains… you should see my collection at home.” He smiled disarmingly and shock back his dark hair. But for a second Carla had seen another look: eyes sparkling crystal-cold, terrifying her. Terrifying! (17).

Timmy Valentine’s collection is kept within a special room in his Los Angeles mansion, one that can only be found through “the labyrinth of the unconscious, of many unconsciousness…. [at] the center. The heart. Here. A secret chamber of the soul” (Somtow,118). This echoes Stephen King’s Danse Macabre and how works of horror dance “through these rooms which we have fitted out one piece at a time… a good horror tale will dance its way to the center of your life and find the secret door to the room you believe no one but you knew of” (King 1981,18). It is in this room that Valentine and his therapist, Carla Rubens, often hold their sessions.

Though Timmy Valentine initially says that he does not dream, he has constructed barriers in his own mind to block out certain memories. As Stephen King says in Danse Macabre:

Ask any psychiatrist what his patient is doing when he lies on the couch and talks about what keeps him awake and what he sees in his dreams. What do you seen when you turn out the light? The Beatles asked; their answer. I can’t tell you, but I know that it’s mine. (26)

Carla learns during their sessions that Valentine is holding back and that he cannot achieve individuation without facing his many past “lives.” Timmy has suffered trauma ad infinitum. In 1942, while traveling with a pack of gypsy, he was captured by the Nazis and sent to Auschwitz. There he was gassed, found by the corpse strippers, only to be sent back to the gas chamber yet again and again as he cannot die. In 1440, Valentine had a haunting encounter with Bluebeard, not the villain of Charles Perrault’s fairy tale, the seducer and murderer of women. Instead, this is the historical Bluebeard, whose crimes are far worse than those of his fictional counterpart. In their book, The Vampire Film: From Nosferatu to Twilight, Alain Silver and James Ursini regard Gilles de Rais, the real-life Bluebeard, as a historical or natural vampire, alongside the likes of Elizabeth Bathory and Vlad Tepes. De Rais was “a national hero fighting with Joan of Arc and was a noted scholar and a Marshal of France” (Silver and Ursini, 25). But after the burning of Joan, he fled to his chateau where he “became involved in various bizarre practices.” He began by using the blood of children (valued on account of its powers of transmutation) for alchemical experiments but soon was led into blacker rites, sodomy, and lust murder (25). Valentine experiences these all firsthand. Bluebeard molests the boy to the point of death: raped, disemboweled, necrophilia at its darkest core, Valentine can only think “surely I will die this time, I will truly die for the last time” (Somtow, 262).

Even before his birth to darkness, Valentine endured agony. As a human boy, he was kidnapped by pirates as a babe and sold to the Sibyl of Cumae. He stayed in that cave, serving the oracle for nearly a decade, never leaving the temple, that is, until he is hurried away to Pompeii to be an unwilling participant in a mystical ceremony. Valentine is castrated, his genitals used to create a poultice that is smeared upon the bodies of his molesters. As Mt. Vesuvius explodes and the pyroclastic flow rains down upon them, lava seeping into their abode, Valentine is bitten at the very point of his death. But he does not die. Forty years later he is unearthed, needing to satiate a hunger that has consumed him for decades.

This is why he sought out a Jungian therapist. To achieve “individuation,” Valentine had to face his own horrors and not those of the collective unconscious that give him power (Somtow,196). He gazed into the darkness, become the darkness, but now wants to escape the isolation of darkness for redemption by love. Carla Rubens was just a step in a thousand-year-old plan.

Eighties Anomalies

Just as Timmy Valentine disappears at the end of Vampire Junction , only to be replaced by an actual teen idol in the 1992 sequel Valentine, so were vampire children replaced with teenage vampires in the mid-1980s and early 1990s with films such as Fright Night (1985), My Best Friend’s A Vampire (1987), and Once Bitten (1985). There were several exemptions where vampire children appeared during this time but were not the focal points. Near Dark and The Lost Boys, both released in 1987, featured a vampire child in their group of vampires, one childlike and one a literal child.

Kathryn Bigelow’s vampire neo-Western Near Dark follows a gang of vampires as they make their way across the Midwest, drinkin’ and killin’ as they please. One night, good ol’ boy Caleb encounters Mae sans the rest of her bloodthirsty brethren. They go for a drive where Caleb gets more than he bargains for after Mae bites him on the neck. She brings Caleb back to the roamer’s RV, where he is met with disdain. The leader, Jesse, threatens Caleb that he can only stay if he learns to hunt and kill.

It becomes apparent that there is a family dynamic among this bloody bunch. Jesse and Diamondback, who have the eldest appearance, play the role of father and mother. Jesse is at least 130 years old, having served for the South during the Civil War. Severen, the most psychotic of the group, is also over a hundred years old, going so far as to imply that Jesse and he started the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Severen is older than Diamondback, who was turned during the Great Depression, but he still refers to her as mama. Then there is Homer, who physically appears to be around 12 but is not the youngest of the crew. That would be the adolescent Mae, who Homer turned 4 years prior. It isn’t clear exactly how old Homer is, but he does snap at Severen for saying he is “a little too little to be jealous,” that he has no “idea what it’s like to have a big man on the inside and a small body on the outside.” At other times Severen refers to Homer as “old man.” Homer tries to make up for his immature appearance with violence, but his childish tendency (constant whining, riding around on a kid’s bike) do little to improve his image as anything more than a brutal brat.

A standout of the adolescent vampire sub-genre that remained dominant through the 1980s and 1990s, The Lost Boys has an eerily similar plot to Near Dark. Michael and his family move to Santa Carla, California, the murder capital of the world. On the boardwalk, he meets the mysterious Starr. He follows her and the motorcycle gang she hangs with, led by Max, back to their cave hideout where Michael is tricked into drinking Max’s blood. Just like Caleb, to truly be part of the group, he must hunt and kill.

If Michael is Caleb, Max is Jesse, and Starr is Mae, then the misfit waif who hangs by Starr’s side, Laddie, is Homer. Unlike the latter, Laddie is an actual child. His age is confirmed by means of a missing person’s posting on the side of a milk carton.

MISSING “LADDIE” THOMPSON b 6–20-76 HT 4 FT WT 50LBS

Laddie and Starr are only half-vampires, those who have yet to make their first kill. Like the rites of passage discussed earlier as the transition from childhood to adulthood, the taking of a life becomes a turning point in many teen vampire movies, often as a metaphor for losing one’s virginity. This conceit is missing from vampire children text. Danny, Claudia, and Timmy Valentine all make their first kill without remorse. There is no pubescent symbolism to be had. This, among the lack of characterization, makes Laddie an oddity. In most scenes he is nothing more than an accessory, clinging to Starr’s arm. During the climactic home invasion, Laddie is left without his “sister” to hold him back, and it is in this moment that he almost gives in to his bloodlust. Laddie tries to attack the Frog brothers, and while the pair of teenage vampire hunters are taken aback, they still don’t take the threat too seriously, screaming “It’s the attack of Eddie Munster!” Starr rushes in before the Frog brothers or Laddie can do any harm, again nullifying Laddie’s significance.

Let the Right One In

The trend of teenage vampires continued into the 1990s with films like Subspecies (1991) and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992) with its spin-off television series running from 1997 to 2003.

The vampire children that did recur over this time were mostly in sequels or adaptations of previous vampire children text. S.P. Somtow published two more Timmy Valentine books, Interview with the Vampire was adapted into a major motion picture in 1994 and ‘Salem’s Lot as a mini-series in 2004. It was also in 2004 that one of the first significant, original works of the twenty-first century to feature vampire children was published.

John Ajvide Lindqvist’s debut novel Let the Right One In is an amalgamation of the numerous vampire children text that preceded it. The location, in this case the Stockholm suburb of Blackeberg, is a character ala Jerusalem’s Lot in ‘Salem’s Lot and is also set in the 1980s, the last decade where vampire children were heavily featured in popular culture. There is an atypical love story, like those featured in Interview with the Vampire. On the other hand, not since Vampire Junction has an author taken the vampire myth and deglamorized the romantic notions left over from Stoker.

The book first introduces us to Oskar, a bullied, portly boy with a taste for chocolate and the macabre. He dreams of taking revenge upon those who assault him on a near daily basis. But he never acts upon these fantasies, besides stabbing the bark off trees. One night, as he attacks an arbor, he is interrupted by Eli, his newest neighbor. She and her father Hakan have just moved in next door to Oskar. Despite her initial misgivings (“I can’t be friends with you. Just so you know”), Eli and Oskar do become companions, to the envy of Hakan.

But since all this with Oskar had started something had changed. A… regression. Eli had started to behave more and more like the child her appearance gave her out to be; had started to move her body in a loose-limbed and careless way, use childish expressions, words. Wanted to play. (Lindqvist 2008, 109)

Though Hakan is concerned that Eli’s relationship with Oskar threatens to expose their secrets, it is Hakan who oversteps. For he is not Eli’s father, but her guardian. And Eli is not the girl next door, but a vampire. Eli depends upon Hakan to acquire the blood necessary for their survival, but Hakan has grown tired (physically, mentally, and emotionally). After a botched murder attempt, Hakan ends up in the hospital with life-threatening injuries and the cops closing in on him and his ward. Now Eli is left without anyone, except Oskar. Is their friendship just a ruse for Eli to find another custodian or do they really care about the boy? And will Oskar reciprocate when he finds out the truth about his new friend?

The truth about Eli goes beyond their vampiric nature. Just like Vampire Junction’s Timmy Valentine, Eli is a eunuch, castrated in the same instance they were turned into a vampire. In the book, Eli initially sidesteps questions about their identity, both as a human and as a girl.

“Oskar, do you like me?”

“Yes. A lot.”

“If I turned out not to be a girl… would you still like me?”

“What do you mean?”

Just that. Would you still like me even if I wasn’t a girl?

“Yes… I guess so.”

Are you sure?

Yes. Why do you ask? (125)

“But Oskar, I can’t. I’m not a girl.”

Oskar snorted. “What do you mean? You’re a guy?”

“No, no.”

“Then what are you?”

“Nothing.”

“What do you mean ‘nothing’?”

“I’m nothing. Not a child. Not old. Not a boy. Not a girl. Nothing.” (171)

Eventually, Eli comes to trust Oskar with both truths. Eli’s unveiling of their lack thereof is a warped reflection of Timmy Valentine’s own unveiling. Eli undresses with the lyrics “… down to the lake…” playing on a record machine in Oskar’s apartment.

The small nipples looked almost black against her pale white skin. Her upper body was slender, straight, and without much in the way of contours. Only the ribs stood out clearly in the sharp overhead light. Her thin arms and legs appeared unnaturally long the way they grew out of her body: a young sapling covered with human skin. Between the legs she had… nothing. No slit, no penis. Just a smooth surface. (Lindqvist 2008, 347)

Somtow first foreshadows Valentine’s missing appendage during a flashback to the summer of 1967, Camp Siena Rapids. Timmy, going by Wally Alvarez at this time, is down by the lake with his other cabin mates, peeping on the skinny-dipping female campers. Collectively, the boys start to masturbate. In Timmy/Wally’s mind, he “does not know what to do. He cannot do this. He will not. He is not a human” (Somtow, 82). It isn’t because Timmy/Wally is a vampire that he refuses to participate in this group activity, but because he lacks the genitals necessary. One of the boys pipes up “Betcha ain’t even got no dick… Betcha you’re a girl!” “Girl, girl, girl” the rest chant (83). After hearing Timmy tell this story, Carla Rubens questions whether “Timmy, archetypal creature, boy vampire, possess anything so prosaic as penis envy, when he’s not even human, let alone a girl? Or a castration complex?” (86). If Eli were Dr. Rubens’ subject, the same question could be raised. Later, when Timmy does dare undress, he bares:

A slender, very pale body, not yet stretched out to awkwardness by puberty, the musculature only hinted at. [a] gaze will fall from the haunting eyes down the smooth curve of throat and the line of chest to the firm, flat pubis. (100)

When Timmy exposes himself, he is met with fear and mockery, found lacking. Eli, on the other hand, is met with confusion but acceptance, more so even than when they revealed their vampiric nature. It is, however, this exploration of sex and sexuality that is glossed over in the various adaptations of the novel.

The English translation of Let the Right One In was published in conjunction with the Swedish film adaptation in 2008. The film stayed true to most of the major plot points of the book surrounding the relationship between Eli and Oskar. Numerous conversations occur verbatim, and most excisions are from sequences sans the twosome. But, as previously mentioned, there are some alterations. The biggest change isn’t the dropping of various supporting characters but rather the lack of exploration as to what it means for Oskar to be in a relationship with the not-boy, not-girl Eli. Whereas in the book Eli freely exposes themselves to Oskar, in the film, Oskar only catches a glimpse of Eli’s smooth crotch area. The matter is not brought up again.

The American adaptation takes this to an even greater extreme, cutting the gender reveal completely. The choice to “remake” Let the Right One In with an American adaptation of the Swedish film was controversial. Director Tomas Alfredson questioned the very purpose of remaking his film saying that “I really don’t know why it would be made. I usually say that bad films, you can remake so you can explore an idea, get it right. To me, this becomes almost some sort of criticism of my movie” (Moriarty 2012). Lindqvist agreed that Alfredson’s work was:

the definitive film, it is, I can’t imagine how anything would be better. BUT, that said, I was very happy when I heart it would be Matt Reeves when I knew there would be a Hollywood production, I thought it was cool that it was him… he’s also emailed me and expressed how much he likes the actual story and could identify with it and that he really would treat it with respect and he looks forward to doing this. (Northlander 2012)

For the American version, there were several cultural alterations. Instead of Eli, Oskar, and Hakan, now there was Abby, Owen, and Thomas. The location changed from Sweden to Los Alamos, New Mexico, though both take place in the early 1980s. As previously stated, the starkest alteration is to Eli/Abby. Where in the book and the Swedish film Eli is androgynous, Abbie is clearly gendered female.

That said, the American film almost deals with the sexual assault suffered by Eli in the book, which is absent in the Swedish film. In the novel, Eli suffers a similar fate to that of Timmy Valentine back in Pompeii. Both are strapped to a table and gagged as an attendant slices deftly at [their] genitals (Somtow, 335). Both try to scream, “but the rope prevents [them] from forming words” (Lindqvist 2008, 252). They cannot “see clearly because of the water running into his eyes”; they “cannot see through the hot spurting tears” (335, 352).

In the deleted scene from Let Me In, Abby also telepathically shows Owen how she was turned. The sequence depicts a cloaked man with a sharp nose looming over a sleeping Abby, before attacking and biting her on the neck. He pins her down as she screams in anguish. According to director Matt Reeves, the scene was cut not because it “would be too intense for viewers… [but] that the scene would have disturbed the flow of the film,” a decision he later regretted (Millican 2019).

Each adaptation sanitizes the lascivious elements more and more, particularly Hakan’s degenerate fancies. Beyond removing his characterization as a pedophile, all the adaptations cut his role in the narrative after he falls from the hospital window to his death, except in the book, Hakan does not die (Lindqvist 2008, 262). Instead, he becomes infected, a true “undead” (390). What follows is not just a hideous rampage of gore but sexual violence as well. Hakan is now nothing more than a tattered mass of flesh with an insatiable hunger, hunger for blood, for lost, for Eli. Where he was unable to act upon his impulses as a human, too weak to make Eli love him, in this form, he can force the point sans fear or pain. The attack on Eli, probably the most visceral violation in the book, is removed from all adapted versions of Let the Right One In.

There are several other incarnations of Let the Right One In, including a play and a short story continuation written by Lindqvist entitled “Let the Old Dreams Die” (2011). An American television series was produced for Showtime, but that show lost the plot, both literally and thematically. According to the showrunner, Andrew Hinderaker, “The original film is about a relationship between an isolated bullied boy and an isolated lonely girl, who we learn is a vampire. What I found so compelling about that film is there’s a much smaller relationship between the vampire and her adult caretaker” (Navarro 2022). There seems to be little influence from the original novel, where said relationship would best be described as ghastly. The American show, with its explicit female gender and literal father/daughter dynamic, is much more in vain with Let Me In than any other rendition. Regardless of its fidelity, or lack thereof, the show was a critical failure and canceled after a single season. The series was just another attempt to try and piggyback off the vampire pop culture popularity that was revived back in 2008.

Breaking Dawn

Just as the English translation of Let the Right One In was published in the States in 2008, so was the conclusion of the Twilight series, Breaking Dawn (and the release of the first film of the Twilight cinematic franchise). For 4 years, fans had been waiting to see if Bella and Edward would finally be together forever. It should not have come as a surprise that the series ended with Bella, now a vampire, living happily ever after with the Cullen coven, but there was one twist not all fans saw coming. Stephanie Meyers was always very coy when answering if vampires could have babies in the Twilight universe.

I focused my answers on the female half of the equation—female vampires cannot have children because their bodies no longer change in any aspect. There is no changing cycle to begin with, and their bodies couldn’t expand to fit a growing child, either. I purposely evaded answering the question, “Can a male vampire get a human female pregnant?” to preserve a tiny bit of surprise in the last book. There were many statements on this subject purported to have come from me, but I never made those comments because, obviously, I knew where this was going. (Meyers 2016)

Meyers was inspired by legends of the incubus and their ability to father children. In explaining how such a child could be conceived, this was also a matter Meyers gave great attention to:

The normal reactions of arousal are still present in vampires, made possible by venom-related fluids that cause tissues to react similarly as they do to an influx of blood. Like with vampire skin—which looks similar to human skin and has the same basic function—fluids closely related to seminal fluids still exist in male vampires, which carry genetic information and are capable of bonding with a human ovum. (Meyers 2016)

While Meyers was aware of the biology involved in creating a human/vampire hybrid, these were not well-known facts to the characters within the Twilight universe, thus the conflict that results from Renesmee’s birth.

The unofficial vampire judicators, the Volturi clan, waited patiently for the Cullen coven to overstep. Edward and Bella’s child seemingly provided them with such an opening. For if vampires supposedly cannot bear children, then how would one explain the sight of “a child. An exquisitely beautiful child… clearly more than human” (547) that is spotted by a vampire outside of the Cullen coven. There could only be one answer: a child bitten and turned. Immortal children, as they are termed, are “the unmentionable bane, the appalling taboo” that require swift extermination. Like Claudia, who Anne Rice describes as having “the ruthless pursuit of blood with all a child’s demanding,” these immortal children are feared for their uninhibited hunger (Rice 97). They are frozen in time with their childish impetuousness and thus out of control (Meyers 2008, 548). The punishment for harboring such a creature is death.

Consequently, the entirety of the Volturi clan travels to Forks, Washington, only to be met by an army of vampires and shapeshifters ready to protect Renesmee the not-immortal child. “It [is] evident almost immediately” to the elders “that she was not an immortal child” rather “that the child is [Edward’s] biologically. That she grows… quickly. That she learns” (Meyers 2008, 713). She is not undead, and her heartbeat allows her to blend in better with humans than her parents, thus posing no threat of exposure (714). The Volturi does have concerns about her unlocked potential, being as unique as she is, until the arrival of another like her. Nahuel is 150 years old, maturing at the age of 7. While he can turn others, in his experience, female half-vampire children lack this venomous trait. What at first appeared to be threatening and transformative is disregarded without conflict, an anticlimactic conclusion to a shocking reveal for both vampires and readers alike.

Televised Terrors

Interspersed between and after adaptations of Let the Right One In and Twilight: Breaking Dawn, vampire children found new ground to dominate: on television.

Loosely based on the Marvel Comics character, the 2006 Spike TV series was a follow-up to the Wesley Snipes cinematic trilogy. In the movies and show, Blade is a dhampir (half-vampire, half-human) who is trying to rid the city of Detroit of vampires. Dhampirs, or day-walkers as they are called in this universe, have most of the strengths of the turned or pure-blooded vampires, but few of the weaknesses. Blade can walk in the sun, isn’t affected by garlic or silver, and possesses superhuman senses, strength, and speed. While he does thirst for blood, he can control his hunger with meditation and a concocted serum. Blade’s condition is based on a mutation and not vampire parentage. His pregnant mother was attacked by the vampire Deacon Frost, and the trauma induced labor, with Blade’s DNA altered by the vampire venom.

The movies and show also feature pure-blooded vampires. Often featured as secondary antagonists, they are often in conflict with turned vampires and Blade. Purebloods are frequently portrayed as braggadocios aristocrats. In the TV series, one of several purebloods featured include Charlotte, a high-ranking member of the House of Chothon. She is conceited, cheeky, and just under 5 feet tall. While Charlotte has the appearance of a child, she is actually over 200 years old. Unlike Renesmee in Breaking Dawn, who has accelerated aging, purebloods in Blade: The Series age at an incredibly slow rate. Charlotte makes up for her lack of size with hubris. Her personality is similar to that of Interview’s Claudia or Divia from Forever Knight, another childlike vampire whose legacy can be tracked back to the Pompeiian disaster. Charlotte almost revels in her duplicitous appearance as she is carried around by her personal bodyguard Thorne and dresses like a Victorian doll. She has her meals brought to her, rather than soil her prim outfits by hunting, though her prey does take some finesse to procure. Charlotte’s fine taste is difficult for even turn-bloods to swallow, her drink of choice: babies’ blood.

Based on Chuck Hogan and Guillermo del Toro’s horror series, The Strain adaptation ran on FX from 2014 to 2017. Both the book and show follow Dr. Ephraim Goodweather from the Centers of Disease Control as he, his team, and a band of hunters try to contain a vampiric virus before the contagion spreads out from New York City. The mythos of The Strain features several unique takes on vampires or Strigoi, including two types of eternal children.

First, there are the Born. Like Blade, they are conceived not through sex between a human and vampire, but by a vampire feeding upon a pregnant woman. They also have a lesser inversion to sunlight. Much of the mythology in The Strain is influenced by del Toro’s work on Blade II. In the Wesley Snipe sequel, Blade faces off against Reapers, humans and vampires who have been turned into mutants with jaws that can unhinge to reveal a barbed proboscis tongue, just like the Strigoi in The Strain. The Born are missing this tongue but do get to keep their genital appendages unlike their Strigoi cousins. However, they lack the ability to procreate, which Blade can do in the comics.

The Feelers are blind children turned and instilled with extra sensory perception to serve as trackers for The Master. In the show, Kelly Goodweather, Ephraim’s ex-wife turned Strigoi, is put in charge of the Feelers who imprint onto Kelly as their guardian.

Let the Right One In questioned what type of person would be willing to “protect” a vampire child. In the case of the TV show, it was parental duty. For the American film, Thomas has been with Abby since he was young and remained loyal and in love. But for the original text, it was Hakan’s lascivious tastes as a pedophile that Eli took advantage of when they recruited him. After Let the Right One In, the direction taken was that the best guardian for a vampire child is a vampire. In the sequel to Let the Right One In, “Let the Old Dreams Die,” Oskar has become a vampire as it is presumably easier for two vampire children to take care of themselves rather than just a young boy and his pale friend. Vampire companions or guardians are used in other shows, beyond The Strain, as well.

Two separate seasons of Ryan Murphy’s American Horror Story have featured vampire children. In the fifth season, Hotel, the Hotel Cortez has a number of peculiar residents, including a slew of ghosts and several vampires. One of the latter, the Countess has a hidden room for her “children,” where the pale white-haired waifs sleep in modernistic coffins. When confronted by one of the children’s mothers who finds their kidnapped son, the Countess explains:

I saved him. Like I save all my children [From] neglect. I could see where they were headed. A tragic wasted life. I opened my heart and the children came to me willingly. I brought them here to keep them safe. The world can be such a dangerous place. (Peristere 2015)

And it is, for the vampire children that are outside of the hotel meet violent ends, either captured and killed for drawing too much attention or choosing to commit suicide. In order to protect her son, the mother accepts the Countess’ offer to become a vampire and act as the children’s governess.

“Red Tide,” the first half of the tenth season Double Feature, has a unique take on the vampire myth. Rather than being transformed via a bite, humans turn into vampires by means of a pill named the muse. However, the pill’s effectiveness depends upon the subject’s level of talent. Those deemed talentless turn into the typical monstrous vampire types called pale people, while the “worthy” contract a thirst for blood and addiction to the pill.

Eleven-year-old Ryan Kiera Armstrong plays Alma Gardner, an impatient violinist who uses the pill rather than time and patience to become a musical prodigy. Alma takes to her newfound bloodlust with ease, but that is less the pill’s doing and more her original personality, willing to do anything and everything to get ahead. The pill did not change her nature, only amplify it. After murdering her own father, Alma moves to Los Angeles with the chemist and her father’s former talent agent, Ursula. It is unclear how the pill will affect Alma’s maturation, but the chemist never discusses any such side effects.

Almost 40 years after his father started the vampire children trend with ‘Salem’s Lot, Joe Hill continued it with 2013’s NOS4A2. The title of the book refers to the license plate on a very peculiar 1938 Rolls-Royce Wraith, driven by the wicked Charlie Manx. Charlie isn’t a vampire in the traditional sense. Instead, his Wraith acts as a conduit, sucking the lives out of children and replenishing his youth. Charlie, also, isn’t the only one with magical transport. Vic McQueen uses the “Shorter Way” bridge to find missing things, so when children begin to go missing from across the country, who better than Vic to find them, that is, if Vic wasn’t a reckless teenage girl.

When Vic does find one of the children, their soul has already been captured by the Wraith. What’s left is “a happy, thoughtless thing. A vampire,” complete with fangs and frozen in time (Hill 2013, 530). While Manx has been often labeled as a vampire, it is the children who are the most bloodthirsty. They are the literal monsters who inhabit Christmasland, an alternative pocket universe in Manx’s mind. When kidnapped, Charlie takes the children here to live forever in holiday cheer. But they do hunger, and when they do, Manx is more than happy to bring them an adult for them to play “scissors-for-the-drifter” with. Manx, like the Countess from Hotel, has altruistic intentions.

Whatever the children had become, whatever he had done to them, he had done to make them safe, to keep them from being run down by the world. He believed in his own decency with all his heart. So it was with every true monster, Vic supposed. (651)

Hill was heavily involved in the adaptation, which remained rather faithful for the first season, which covered the first half of the book (Vinney 2020). However, season 2 departed from the source material to feature more rounded characterization that was missing from the original text. These changes provided greater insight into Max’s background, particularly his childhood. In Episode 2.07 “Cripple Creek,” it is revealed that as a child Max was molested and that his mother knew. This alteration from the book creates a more sympathetic villain, an understanding of how he can justify “saving” children while murdering their parents. For Manx, the worst accusation Vic could throw at him is accusing Manx of being a child molester.

Conclusion

While Lindquist and Let the Right One In may have revitalized undead children, the book also marked the end of offensiveness. Even though some vampires do not cast a reflection, their stories act as a mirror to society and its values. What Lindqvist’s creation reflected back was so distasteful that future tales fled from such vulgarity.

Tales of immortal children after Let the Right One In avoided mature topics surrounding sex and existentialism. Instead, an impetus was placed on protecting the innocence lost in earlier tales about teething tots, whether it be with the rise of dhampirs and purebloods, the increase of those lacking sentience by means of stunted maturation mentally, or more altruistic guardians who would never harm their wards.

Horror writers are often asked “why do you want to make up horrible things when there is so much real horror in the world?” King’s answer to this question in Danse Macabre is that “we make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones” (King 1981, 26). There is little catharsis to be found in books like Vampire Junction or Let the Right One In, where the darkness often wins. So rather than excise these fears by the destruction of such monstrous conditions, the horrors are removed entirely. The Feelers lack the sentience to miss the lives that were taken from them. None of Manx’s children will ever be abused again. It just became easier to ignore real-life horrors, rather than facing them head on as Let the Right One In forces us to do.

Cross-References