At the top of my list of “foreign films not to ruin with a remake” sits LET THE RIGHT ONE IN, the Swedish child vampire movie that was damn close to perfect in every way.
But alas, we couldn’t help ourselves, and now we have LET ME IN coming out less than two years after the original. KICK-ASS’ Chloe Moretz is taking over the fangs of the tween girl vampire this time around, presumably with less underage nudity (I felt like Chris Hansen was going to break down my door after that). She sat down with MTV and talked about the remake, and discussed what’s changed and what’s staying the same, revealing quite a lot of plot details in the process.
“It’s about a boy who lives in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Growing up, not many people like him, he’s not popular. He’s wimpy, kind of an outcast,” she said of the role played by Kodi Smit-McPhee (“The Road”) in the flick, which is due in theaters October 1st. “Then this girl moves in, she’s totally different… she’s a beast, [being a vampire] is a demon inside of her and she can’t stop it from coming out… when I turn into a vampire, it’s terrifying.”
“I don’t have fangs; but [my teeth] are quite scary. I can’t really say anything about it, but they’re terrifying,” revealed the actress, who recently wrapped production on the film.
“I’m the only vampire. You never meet her maker, who made her a vampire. You have a flashback scene where you get it, but you don’t. It just leaves her background kind of blurry. Because, she’s been around for 250 years.”
“It’s in the ’80s; it’s not modern,” Moretz said of one similarity to the original that Reeves has been quite adamant about retaining. “[And my character] is not really like a regular vampire. It definitely doesn’t glamorize the idea of a vampire; you see it’s not a fun thing to have in your life. She wishes not to have it; she wishes she could be a normal girl, but she can’t. And she would never put it upon anyone else to become a vampire. That’s why anyone who she does suck their blood, she kills. She does not leave them to become a vampire, because she knows how bad and how hard that is for them – and she wouldn’t want to put that on anyone else.”
“She’s definitely a lover,” Moretz said of her take on Abby – or Eli in the original “Let the Right One In” novel and movie. “She’s not a fighter.”
Damn, I don’t even know what’s left to talk about after all that. It sounds pretty much the same as the original, but as proven by QUARANTINE/REC, you can remake a foreign horror movie shot by shot, and somehow, it will end up being worse.