Ingrid Pitt RIP

Ingrid Pit died at age 73 in her South London home.  The actress, a concentration camp survivor and horror movie scream queen of the 60's was best know for such shockingly sexy Hammer Horror epics as Countess Dracula, The Vampire Lovers, the subversive horror classic The Wicker Man and a couple serials of the classic Doctor Who series, most notably as the Queen of Atlantis in 'The Time Monster'.

Unlike some scream queens who've voiced discomfort with their horror movie infamy, Pitt quite enjoyed her sexy, predatory image and liked playing the baddies.

Pick up and put on The Vampire Lovers some time and raise a glass of the red stuff to one of the premiere scream queens.

It's in the Blood

Vampirism is almost as flexible a metaphor as Zombies can be. Vampires have represented teen alienation, addiction, class elitism and of course sex. Most recently legions of enthralled teenage girls have utterly internalized getting bit by a vampire as corresponding exactly with 'losing it' in a series of rather dim novels and now movies.

But the correlation at the heart of the myth and implicit in Dracula, the Ur text of the genre, is vampirism as disease.

In Stoker's Dracula, Vampirism is a blood born taint being fought by science. The supernatural element is of course present, but as others have observed its really a book about Syphilis. In Victorian England before antibiotics drove a stake into it, Syphilis was what AIDS was until recently; an incurable, barely treatable blood disease. Nice people didn't talk about it, it was spread by 'beastly' behavior and the sufferers would die slowly and grotesquely being marred with ugly stigmatizing sores and wasting away and going mad as the disease ate at their brains.

In that context, Bram Stoker's Dracula with its emphasis on blood borne evil and modern (for the time) medical methods like transfusions becomes a very different beast than it is to modern readers.

Nosferatu the first unauthorized adaptation of Stoker's tale made the disease metaphor explicit. The vampire is a horrific deformed creature with rat like teeth bringing plague and swarms of vermin with him as he invades the comfortable reality of modern Hamburg.

And now film-maker Guillermo Del Toro and co-author Chuck Hogan make the disease metaphor explicit again with the first in their new trilogy of novels The Strain.

The hero is a doctor for the Center for Disease Control brought in to investigate a mysterious plague that has wiped out an entire airplane full of passengers - or has it? The medical mystery element is played well, but the underlying monstrous evil of the vampire begins to unfurl as the story goes on. Disease becomes unearthly evil gradually but utterly.

In this age of SARS and H1N1 and the world wide unease that we are due for something makes The Strain as timely and unsettling as any horror novel you've ever read. The fact is that a deadly killer flu strain seems to hit the world every 4 decades or so - and the last one hit us in the 60's. If SARS or H1N1 aren't it that doesn't mean it isn't coming.

The airplane opening in The Strain is a reminder that in our modern globalized world, the next killer virus could be burning in the bloodstreams of the worlds capitals for days or weeks before we even realized what was happening to us. This is a modern unease that The Strain captures very well.

Del Toro, of course, is the film-maker responsible for Pans Labyrinth, The Devil's Backbone and the Hellboy movies among others. He's currently in New Zealand working on the Hobbit with Peter Jackson. If you've seen and enjoyed any of these films - and enjoying them pretty much goes hand in hand with seeing them - then you will love The Strain. I'm looking forward avidly to the next book in the series, and after reading it I think you will be too.

Let the REAL Right One In

I have to second the Aint it Cool team: Remaking the recent Swedish horror classic 'Let the Right One In' is unnecessary, fraught with disaster and just a Really Bad Idea.

Yeah the posters AICN turned up are vaguely promising, but considering the original only came out last year, such indecent haste to re-film it in English, seems outright disrespectful

Do yourself a favor and let yourself be hypnotized by this icy tale of innocence and blood in its original version - the DVD even has a dubbed version if you just can't hack subtitles. Let the Right One In is easily the best Vampire movie I've seen in years. If you haven't seen it yet you're missing out.

Set in the snowy closed in world of a Swedish housing estate in the mid 80's, we are introduced to Oskar, a slight, shy 12 year old bullied by his peers and ignored by his parents, who have less presence in this film than the adults in a Charlie Brown cartoon. They're there to provide the minimum basics of parenting while withholding any real involvement. Oskar frankly acts like a budding serial killer as he fantasises about stabbing his enemies and making them 'squeal like a pig!' But mostly he just seems intensely isolated.

And then there's Eli, who only comes out at night, wandering through the Swedish winter in bare feet. Eli is 12 too. But Eli has been 12 for very long time.

The two meet and form a careful but quickly all-encompassing bond in the silent emptiness of winter darkness in abandoned public spaces, playgrounds under street lights and barren apartments.

Oskar needs human connection desperately, but Eli's needs are more pragmatic, and Eli isn't human. Both are innocent, in the way that children or sharks are innocent:

They do only what they have to.

Another amazing thing about this movie: It's about real kids. Not little adults spouting dialogue, not kids as adults mythologize them, but real affectless kids, free of ironic detachment or hip cynical humor, free of all but the clumsiest most revealing attempts at childish artifice.

Real human child behavior in movies is rare enough to be a jolt when you see it.

It's also a rare thing when a movie comes along and pulls you into its world, against your will even. Let the Right One In is a masterful example of sparse but immersive film making that treats its characters and its audience with respect.