Two small, doomed 12-year-olds meet and fall in love. Oskar carries a knife, stabs a tree, fantasizes about talking back to the bullies, growling at them to squeal like pigs. Eli is a shoeless blood junkie, shuffling when she is more human, growling and leaping into trees when her affliction seizes her. He would jump into a hole in the ice if the jerks at school told him to. She doesn’t care if artery-pumped blood has splattered on her face, if her mouth is stained all around like she stuffed it into a flat of berries. He keeps a scrap book of brutal crime news clippings. She rooms with the serial killer behind one or two of them.It’s not supposed to feel good, or like an adventure, or like a best friends story. And thank the starless skies of northern Sweden that “Let the Right One In” feels nothing like the made-for-Hot-Topic soap opera of “Twilight.""Let the Right One In” is creepy and bloody and scary and, if you’ve ever been a persecuted, lovesick, cut-no-slack 12-year-old, it may well grab you by the neck.”Do you want to be my girlfriend?”

“Oskar… I’m not a girl.”

“Oh… But do you want to go steady or not?”And there’s horror of the finest order: A half-drained victim — corpsus interruptus — some local bleached-blonde, beat down former Miss Thing, hospitalized and locked to her bed, asks the doctor in a croak to open the window. She’s just had the epiphany of her life. He does, and we’re looking dead straight across the room at her bodyablaze, scorching with the force of dragon’s breath in a geyser against the ceiling. Or Oskar’s head stuffed, eyes squinted shut, under the water. We hold our breath as he does, submitting to the worst bully there is. Suddenly, someone is being dragged through the water behind him, swiftly and supernaturally. In the background, afreshly decapitated head falls into the water, blood inky and dark around it. In the foreground, the muscular forearm holding Oskar under floats free too.The back story isn’t important, and thankfully, there’s no 10-minute interlude about the demon who grabbed Eli the orphaned slave-girl in some dark Portobelo alleyway on a stinking night in 1742, cursing her to a life of hunting and blah blah blah. Eli’s not a vampire to Oskar. She’s his avenging angel, his imaginary friend, his Phantom of the Opera, his Tyler Durden, his inner desires and darkness come to life.”I don’t kill people,” he says.

“But you’d like to, if you could… to get revenge. Right?” Eli asks.

“Yes.”

“I do it because I have to,” she says. “Be me, for a little while.”When the two plot escape together, these two children still at the age and size where an adult can fling you over their shoulder, sack-of-flour style, it feels scary and tenuous. The persecution isn’t going to end. And their partnership isn’t about curling up together, grabbing hands and swinging on the jungle gym. It’s about needingsomeone so bad you’ll bleed for them.

Ashley O’Dell reviews movies that aren’t in theaters anymore.