Let Me In (Re)considered Alone

I'm not always a huge fan of Jim Emerson, whose blog "Scanners" is occasionally prone to do things like talk about why he doesn't like The Dark Knight for fucking weeks on end in utterly excruciating detail, but I was pleasantly surprised and struck by his defense of Let Me In, here (http://blogs.suntimes.com/scanners/2010/10/let_me_in_the_role_of_evil_in.html)... especially so because by the time we get to the comments, it becomes an equally interesting discussion of what is/has been good in American horror in the last fifteen years or so. For myself, I continue to the think Let Me In was reductionist in odd ways yet still viable; I could've really done without the musical cueing (though I think that about most American films), and making Eli into Abby of course simplifies the narrative in various ways. Nevertheless, there's a core which translates through both versions--the core of the age-unequal relationship being inherently prospectively predatory, whether or not the (actually) older person is a genuine predator.

Similarly, I liked the inclusion of Owen getting to see what Abby had done to her previous protector--that he was once a sweet, outcast boy like himself, deformed by time and the rigours of taking care of a little girl who's really a deathless crone; it made me wonder how they could possibly continue the same charade as they moved towards our time-period, when records become stable and all-inclusive, and pedophilia is the consistent spectre (will he become her "brother"? Will he be forced to fish in a series of GFs/wives, living camouflage to be drained and dumped?).

And Abby's background, too--what was that, exactly? Did she just "get sick" one day back in the early 1800s or late 1700s, around the time of girls like Mercy Brown, and was then hidden and enabled by her family--a professional invalid, subject to the cult of such as she moved towards Victorian times--until she simply outlived them all? In her day, a twelve-year-old being engaged to or even marrying a man of her original protector's age would've been no big thing--see Virginia Clemm Poe. Did she ride that fact for a while, before switching gradually--maybe around the 1950s, with the introduction of an artificial "teenage" evolutionary stage--to being a permanent child, instead of a quasi-adult?

Amended to add: And let's assume that like Claudia, because of her size, Abby probably can't "turn" anybody else--not an adult, definitely. So that adds the extra thing of "you can decide right now that you want to be a kid 'til the end of time (which I pretty much know you won't choose, because I know how ambivalent you are about being a kid in the first place) or you can age out into 'powerful' adulthood, only to realize you will now inevitably keep aging 'til you're weak again, then die. For me. Enjoy!"

(The fact that we never meet any other vampires in Abby's world only makes it all the more creepy. Because maybe it was just a mutation, and none of her victims ever survives, even the infected ones. Maybe she's literally all there is. Or, if not--will they ever run into one of her discards somewhere, a person who sees Owen as their competition? Or a person who'll do any damn thing to destroy Abby, on the mistaken assumption her death might "cure" them?)

Naturally, I miss the queer and intersex subtexts of the original, but I'm far from considering Let Me In a complete failure just on those grounds alone. Nice/interesting to see somebody who agrees with me, even if it's a guy I often don't agree with myself.;)