Halloween is a fast approaching and it is damn important that everyone watch a good horror movie before the season is over. After all, most people consider the genre to be barely more respectable than porn and this is the one time of year that you can indulge in horror guilt free. Unfortunately, all that Hollywood is offering for Halloween 2008 is yet another Saw sequel (seriously, are they really up to five now?) and Quarantine (a glossy remake of a Spanish terror flick). While I’m sure these movies will pack plenty of gore, they are both empty experiences that fail to capture the magic that can be achieved by a truly great horror film.

Fortunately, some of the good people in Sweden have stepped up and made a horror movie worth watching this Halloween. It’s called Let The Right One In and while the movie may not pack an instantly attention grabbing horror title like Cannibal Holocaust, it is one of the most brilliant examples of the genre in recent years. Opening in America this week and expanding to Canada next week, you won’t see many posters or TV spots begging you to go to this movie. But that’s a shame because it just might be a future classic of the genre.

Let The Right One In is about a 12-year-old outcast boy befriending a mysterious girl who claims to live next door. The girl soon turns out to be a vampire, but not before the boy becomes too attached to be willing to let go of her simply because she is brutally murdering people around town and feasting on their sweet, delicious blood. What’s remarkable about the movie is how much emotional resonance can be found beneath the scares. Most films of this kind would simply use the characters as a means to connect the horror sequences. However, in Let The Right One In the characters are the main attraction, making the sudden outbursts of violence all the more upsetting and effective.

If there is a single reason why Let The Right One In achieves such a unique tone, it has to be director Tomas Alfredson (a man known in his native land for his comedies…not exactly a quality on display here). Alfredson has gone on record as saying that not only was he not particularly familiar with vampire lore when he made the movie, but he’s also not even really a fan of the horror genre. Normally when a filmmaker attempts horror without a deep understanding of the genre the result is a muddled mess, but that’s not the case here. Through sheer nativity Alfredson creates a totally unique horror tone that manages to worm its way under the skin of cynical contemporary audiences because it rarely complies to conventional horror rhythms. Alfredson manages to give the screenplay’s few potentially clichéd scenes a new spin simply because he doesn’t know how to shoot horror in a conventional manner.