Echoes of Romeo and Juliet in Let the Right One In and Let Me In

Abstract

John Ajvide Lindqvist’s Swedish vampire-novel Låt den Ratte Komma In (Let the Right One In, 2004) quotes Romeo and Juliet several times. First, there appears a longer quotation, initially as a chapter epigraph and subsequently as the contents of a written note left by one of the tween protagonists for the other: Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops. I must be gone and live, or stay and die.1 Second, there appears a shorter quotation, ‘Then window, let day in and let life out/ whose grammatically imperative form echoes the novel’s similarly imperative title (Lindqvist, 2007, p. 176; 3.5.41). These quotations announce the play as a haunting central source text for an entirely unorthodox modern ‘romance’ about two children victimized by a hypocritical adult society. It is ‘unorthodox’ for several reasons, but mainly because 12-year-old Eli has been dead for 200 years.