This paper will draw on Linda Hutcheon’s account in A Theory of Adaptation (2013) of “transculturating” and “transcultural adaptations” in examining how two American adaptations of Nordic Gothic texts – Stephen King’s TV series Kingdom Hospital (2004) and Matt Reeves’s movie Let Me In (2010) – change what Hutcheon calls the “ideological valences” of the adapted texts: Lars von Trier’s Danish TV series Riget (1994, 1997) and John Ajvide Lindqvist’s Swedish novel Låt den rätte komma in (2004) and its subsequent 2008 Swedish film adaptation. All of these narratives introduce ghosts and/or vampires into actually existing and, to a large extent, realistically depicted late twentieth- or early twenty-first-century Scandinavian and American environments. However, I will argue that there are significant ideological differences between the Nordic and the American texts, which have an impact on both the aesthetics and the effects of these Gothic or horror narratives.