Scared of getting abducted in your car? Don’t watch this Let Me In clip

High atop my list of phobias (right underneath heights but right above giant hairy spiders) is the thought of getting in my car at night and having some crazy serial killer jump up from the backseat and attack me. So naturally this clip from LET ME IN, featuring Richard Jenkins, vampire enabler, doing exactly that, freaked me the f*ck out.

I saw this clip at Comic-Con and sadly what you’re seeing here cuts off the best part. I’ll let you watch the clip and then let’s connect on the flipside and I’ll tell you what you’re missing…

OK so what you see in that clip is some poor unsuspecting teenager being attached by Jenkins, who’s out for blood for Chloe Moretz’s Abby. But when the clip screened at Comic-Con, it was far more effective. I guess some SPOILERS lie ahead but it’s nothing that hasn’t already been screened quasi-publicly so…

There’s more to the scene both before and after what we see here. You get to see that Jenkins is in the backseat so you know he’s there well before the kid in the front seat does. It just adds to the suspense because you know what’s gonna happen, you just don’t know how or when.

At the end of the clip above, you start to see the car spiraling out of control. In the original clip, you keep the same inside-point-of-view shot as the car careens off the road, through the guardrail and begins tumbling down the side of a hill. It’s a beautifully constructed shot and I’m frankly shocked they cut it out of the footage. The teenagers you see at the gas station catch up with the crashed vehicle and see Jenkins’ character crawl out of the car (albeit, quite injured). He pulls out a jar of acid and….well, if you’ve seen the original, you know what happens next.

All this to say, what you see above is a cool clip but not nearly as indicative of how cool it is in the movie. There was a collective WHOA in Hall H when it was screened. LET ME IN will be playing both Fantastic Fest and Toronto Film Festival and we’ll have reviews of the film later this month.