Abstract
The horror of the vampire child is twofold. First, there is the danger they present to adults, whose instincts to protect the young are turned against them, making for easy prey. Second, there is the existential hell suffered by those damned to live eternity forever trapped in preadolescence. Nothing exhibits this torment to such a nightmarish degree than John Ajvide Lindqvist’s Let the Right One In. The 2004 Swedish horror novel lays plain, in horrific detail, the dread of a child’s perpetual existence: never growing old, never finding love, or finding it in all the wrong places. If traditional vampire tales are often a metaphor for sexual vices and transgressions, then stories of vampire children are about a loss of innocence.
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Reblin-Renshaw, L. (2024). Let the Right One In and Vampire Children. In: Bacon, S. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of the Vampire. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36253-8_48
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