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Sure, movie; I'll take you up on your titular plea. Everyone else has left you out in the proverbial Swedish winter, but not me. Come on in, it's warm in here. I don't think any particular film is inherently unworthy of being made. A good movie is a good movie is a good movie.

Let Me In is a good movie. It's about as good, actually, as the other one - a bit more gruesome, a bit more preoccupied with particularly American foibles of religion and age, a bit inert in its careful similarities to the other one. But it's effective, and communicates its mood and ideas perfectly, and y'know what? It's a scary little Hammer horror movie. If that notion doesn't warm your cockles on a cold winter's night, don't go see this movie, or any others like it.

I suppose every boys' gym class has a kid like Owen (Kodi Smit-McPhee), the one who is within a hair of thirteen but has yet to sprout any hair - a couple years' late on puberty, and therefore tantalizingly un-masculine to his classmates. It's unlikely, though, that most kids like Owen had a first girlfriend like Abby (Chloë Grace Moretz), in that she's pretty, a good listener, and... oh yes, an undead killing machine. Owen likes Abby, and we can see why. That she occasionally crawls through his bedroom window covered in blood is really more alarming for the fact that there's a girl in his bedroom, rather than that she's a vampire.

Did Steven Spielberg know E.T. was one remove away from being a horror film? Let Me In would convince him. It captures the same moment in the collapse of the American family (and in the same year); it connects the lost boy with salvation by means of an equally supernatural, and superpowerful, mate; the fact that it's snowing doesn't hide the God-light pouring through overexposed windows as the boy takes the first steps towards being preoccupied with something other than his own miserable existence. Abby says she likes puzzles, but so does Owen, I think; and Abby's a hell of a puzzle. (Girls generally are.)

Smit-McPhee and Moretz rule this picture with childlike glee, giving fresh, vigorous performances in tricky roles that confidently play out the themes that Matt Reeves has cherry-picked for his adaptation of John Ajvide Lindqvist's novel. Reeves is particularly concerned with Manichean notions of good and evil that are force-fed into American youth culture by bible-thumping elders. Prayers and photos of Christ litter the film, and the prelude cuts off Reagan's "Evil Empire" speech right between "if America ever ceases to be good" and "she will cease to be great." An entire adult morality structure is laid out, and ultimately wholesale rejected, by the children. That's a neat trick, exemplified in a late scene where a cop visits Abby's home to investigate grisly murders that would, in a regular film, be condemned; here, we just wait for Abby to eat his face off. I felt light echoes of His Dark Materials throughout, as the kids threw down the kingdom of heaven and built their republic.

Being American, Let Me In is generally more explicit about some things (the violence) and less explicit about others (the sex). Also worth noting is that it largely omits the subculture of adult neighbours featured in the other one. This too strikes me as very American: no interest in adult personalities, preferring the world of eternal adolescence. Issues around bullying, especially in the context of the last few months, hit hard here. These are cultural touchstones, not "Americanization" or "dumbing down." They make the text a worthy read, and any dismissals of "it's just like the other one" miss out on the fun.

As usual watching films of this type, I have questions that aren't the film's place to answer, but apply. Prime among them: how do vampire sex drives work? I wonder this one a lot. 224-year-old Angel lusting after 16-year-old Buffy always creeped me out - just because he looks like a twentysomething instead of a centegenarian doesn't make him any less of a centegenarian. Now here's Abby. She looks 12, but she's older than that; did her sex drive mature, or stay in place? If the former, wouldn't she find Owen ill-equipped to her needs? If the latter, won't he shortly find her a poor choice for a girlfriend? Just sayin'. Let Me In is a lot more chaste than this, settling for a cute first date and a genuinely memorable first kiss. But I don't know which character to feel sorrier for, in the long run.