Twilight. Seems like it's everywhere these days. It's at the store when I go buy groceries, glossy magazines with Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson staring hungrily at each other. It's on airplanes, rows and rows of noses stuck in books, the same cover showing one bright-red apple and two snow-white hands. It's on T-shirts, necklaces and billboards. It's at the mall. It seems to have taken over Hot Topic. You know, that store that used to be cool?

This is a genuine phenomenon. I won't attempt to answer why. For one thing, I haven't read the books (Stephanie Meyer has written four of them). Secondly, I think that question has already been answered, by none other than Stephen King (who's not a fan, by the way): "People are attracted by the stories, by the pace, and in the case of Stephenie Meyers, it's very clear that she's writing to a whole generation of girls and opening up kind of a safe joining of love and s*x in those books. It's exciting and it's thrilling and it's not particularly threatening because it's not overtly s*xual."

I'm not going to go anywhere near that. What I'd like to talk about is the movie, which I am familiar with, and its relative merits compared with another teen vampire film that was released last year and recently came out on DVD, Tomas Alfredson's Let the Right One In.

Don't worry, I'm not about to bash Twilight the movie. Not too severely, anyway. What I like most about it is the setting. Shy 17-year-old Isabelle (Kristen Stewart) moves from Phoenix to a rainy little town in Washington called Forks, where her father is the sheriff. This is Twin Peaks territory. The climate, the folksy people and the surrounding countryside are all very cinematic and give the film a melancholic tone. This is appropriate for a main character who is sick with love. I think Hardwicke was the right choice to direct - her approach to teen s*xuality in films like Thirteen, Lords of Dogtown and even The Nativity Story is ideal for this series - and I don't see why she's being kept away from the sequels. It's not her fault that the movie is boring.

That's right, BO-RING. Making vampires dull is no small feat - they're beautiful, they drink blood, they live forever, they're s*xual gods - but Meyers has done it. (Vegetarian vampires? Seriously? WTF?!) The movie fails because it stays faithful to the mechanics of Meyers' plot. The romance between Isabelle and the vampire Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) is reasonably compelling, even though Pattinson is a far less engaging performer here than he was in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. The picture falls apart when a rival vampire gang comes to town and Isabelle has to hide out in a hotel. This is really remedial stuff.

Where Twilight is all about surface details and skin-deep affections, Let the Right One In is a vampire film of almost primordial power. It concerns a severely bullied 12-year-old Swedish boy named Oskar who discovers that the girl next door, Eli, isn't like the other girls at school. The plot is so rich with detail that the viewer is invited to play catch-up. Eli has hooked up with a child killer (chillingly played by Per Ragnar) so she'll have constant supplies of fresh blood. Oskar and Eli are genuine outsiders - these aren't CW versions of teen alienation, like the ones that Twilight presents - and we care deeply about them. And frankly, Alfredson brings a visual style to his film that makes Twilight look like an after-school special. There are shots in Let the Right One In that I will never forget - particularly the way Alfredson stages the climactic poolside slaughter.

Obviously, it's more than a little depressing that Twilight has grossed hundreds of millions more at the box office. I realize that Let the Right One In is a horrifying movie that deserves its R-rating. Still, it might be nice to see a few more of our young people branching out when it comes to film.