Let the Right One In director finds his next project in dark children’s book The Brothers Lionheart

I found LET THE RIGHT ONE IN to not only be one of the best horror stories of the last decade, but also one of the sweetest love stories as well. It was at once both a truly heartbreaking and grin-inducing look at the human condition through the lens of an inhuman anomaly, and an absolutely brilliantly-made film besides.  And while I was dismayed, frustrated, and a disappointed with director Tomas Alfredson’s follow-up TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY, his next possible project looks to be a definite return to the dark territory of LET THE RIGHT ONE IN and I could not be more pleased by that.

Alfredson has purchased the rights to Astrid Lindgren’s much-lauded children’s book THE BROTHERS LIONHEART, a dark fantasy tale that involves a fantasy world and a dragon and also deals with the same themes of death and abandonment.  LET THE RIGHT ONE IN author John Ajvide Lindquist has been commisioned to take a crack at the screenplay, but as that’s all the movement thus far on the project we still have a fair amount of time before anything further can happen. 

You can be assured there’ll be more as soon as we hear it on this one.

As per Amazon, here’s the book’s plot: There’s no one Karl Lion loves more than his older brother, Jonathan, who is brave, strong, and handsome – everything Karl believes he is not. Karl never wants to be parted from him. But Karl is sick, and knows he’s going to die. To comfort him, Jonathan tells him stories of Nangiyala, the wonderful place he’ll be going to when he dies, and where he will wait until Jonathan is ready to join him there. Then the unthinkable happens …Jonathan is killed in an accident. Heartbroken, Karl longs for the day he’ll be reunited with his brother. When the time comes, he finds Nangiyala just as wonderful as he’d imagined. However, Nangiyala is under threat. A cruel tyrant is determined to claim it as his own, and at his command is a terrible beast that is feared throughout the land. Karl must summon all of his courage to help his brother prepare for the battle that lies ahead…