The Paradox of the Other in 'Dracula' and 'Let the Right One In' Anonymous 12th Grade

The Other is often used to mean the hostile, the dangerous, the deadly. However, the term itself makes no mention of this, it can just as easily refer to the inexplicable or simply taboo, something that humans are notorious for attempting to understand. This is why in both Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1899) and Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In (2008), the ‘Other’ is not just a source of vilification, but also fascination. In the former, a horrifying, yet still intriguing desecration of the norms of the time, and in the latter, a mysterious but sympathy inducing trespass on its own cultures values, over a century later.

Stoker is in no way attempting to create a creature who reader’s should empathise with, or regard positively in any way at all for that matter, his purpose is instead to create a character so totally evil, that the other characters in the novel, as well as the reader, try to understand it as well as they can, simply so they can understand how they can be so horrific. The part of the novel with the most ‘fascination’ per se with Dracula is Lucy and her relationship with him, which is initiated in the quote, ‘it seemed to me as though something dark stood behind the seat where the white figure shone’, which is of...