Jun 30, 2009 08:00 AM
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San Francisco, 3:02 PM
Tue Feb 9
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Matt Reeves, of Cloverfield fame, is still plugging away at his American adaptation of Swedish vampire film Let The Right One In. I shudder to think of what's being changed, because the original was basically flawless.
The original foreign film was based on John Ajvide Lindqvist's original novel, from which it deviated here and there, but at least Lindqvist still seemed to work a bit with the Swedish film crew. The horror film follows the story of the brutally bullied Oskar whose mysterious new neighbor, Eli offers up a way out of his perpetual world of school abuse. But Eli comes with a whole lotta drama, him/her being a bloodsucking vampire and all.
There's plenty of reasons this movie doesn't need to be remade, but mainly I'm against it because the original Swedish film was so well crafted from beginning to end that a remake is totally unnecessary. The big pool scene at the end could easily be one of my all time favorite climaxes in modern day cinema. The film teeters on this creepy edge between what's real and what's too terrible for you to imagine, so that you find youself as confused as little Oskar most of the time, and it works.
According to the L.A. Times, Reeves is on the second draft of the script, which will be set in the Reagan era in Colorado. Even though Reeves swears he won't be aging the two main characters in the film to increase the appeal to a larger audience (because sexy vampires sell more tickets), I just can't seem to believe it. My biggest fear is that they're going to make this a sappy love story overwrought with crappy dialogue, when the original is so, so, so much more than that. Or worse they could throw out Eli's whole androgynous storyline entirely, which I can easily see someone doing because it's just too hard to explain to audiences. But that's the beauty of this movie, it's not fully explained, it forces the audience to imagine the horrible deeds that are happening off camera, in a dark alley or above the water. Please don't ruin the one stand-out vampire movie we've had in the last few years. It's the saving grace of an oversaturated genre.
Send an email to Meredith, the author of this post, at meredith@io9.com.
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