It’s a testament to the quality of writer/director Mark Reeves’ Let Me In that it reminds me of so many other films I’ve loved.

Like M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense, it elegantly blends horror movie tropes with a coming-of-age tale. Like Steven Spielberg’s E.T., it captures suburban life from a child’s-eye view and drops an otherworldly visitor into the life of a boy in a broken home. Like Guillermo Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth, it juxtaposes supernatural horror with the horrors of the everyday world.

I thought of each of those films after I finished Let Me In. I also thought about the Twilight series, a far more popular and less compelling tale of a vampire finding love and acceptance with a human being. And I thought about True Grit, another of my favorite 2010 films, that — like Let Me In — is both a remake of a beloved movie and an adaptation of a beloved novel.

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