Check the Right One Out
By:
July 5, 2010
With the nation still in the grip of undead mania, Let Me In, a new vampire movie dubbed by some as the “anti-Twilight,” is set to hit megaplexes in the Fall. Here’s the trailer:
The trouble is, the film was already made. Let Me In is a remake of last year’s astonishing Let the Right One In, by Swedish director Tomas Alfredson. The most innovative vampire flick since Nosferatu, Let the Right One In tells the story of an awkward and alienated boy and his friendship with a girl who never goes out in the daytime and never grows old. Alfredson’s film effortlessly embodies the themes of vampirism — transformation, desire, the nature of evil — all crudely name-checked in the trailer for the Hollywood remake. With its flash-cut intimations of hot-button American “issues” like school violence and child molestation, the American version promises an urgent update of a film released… all of two years ago. Of course, it will be in English — not Swedish, or Esperanto, or whatever incomprehensible foreign tongue that other movie was in.
I want to go out on a limb here and say that the remake — which of course I have not seen — literally and categorically sucks. Categorically because the original is freshly unsettling and worthy of every consideration; literally because it’s the cinematic equivalent of vampirism, sucking the blood from a spirited original and turning it into the deathless horror of a “brand.”
Alfredson’s movie was based on a 2004 novel of the same name by Swedish author John Lindqvist. The title references not only vampire lore, but a Morrissey song with lyrics that prescribe the critical reaction the remake deserves:
Let the right one in
Let the old dreams die
Let the wrong ones go
They cannot
They cannot
They cannot do what you want them to do
Below is the trailer for Alfredson’s film. It can be streamed on Netflix. Watch it on a hot July day, and bathe yourself in the welcome chill of a nameless Scandinavian apartment complex stalked by a horror that yearns.