Entertainment

Director Opposes Hollywood Remake of Hit Horror Film

When a movie or series works somewhere other than the United States, Hollywood is on the lookout and tries to make its own version. It has happened with The Men Who Didn’t Love Women, with CODA, and with Solaris. That, just to give some examples. Sometimes the result has been good. Others, a disaster. Sometimes, the director of the original has not found it bad, but the opposite has also happened.

In 2009, Let Me In, a Swedish vampire horror film based on the novel of the same name by John Ajvide Lindqvist, was released. Directed by Tomas Alfredson, the film, which had Lindqvist as a screenwriter, was a success. Critics loved it, and it is considered one of the best horror films of all time.

The story follows Oskar, a 12-year-old boy who is bullied at school. One day he meets Eli, a mysterious girl his age who lives with an adult man and who becomes his only friend.

The truth is that Hollywood had already noticed this story before Alfredson’s film was shown to the public. In 2008, the English-language film rights to Let Me In were purchased by Hammer Films with Matt Reeves, director of The Batman, behind the cameras.

When Alfredson learned that Hollywood wanted its own version, he was not happy. And they originally asked him to direct the remake, but he turned it down. “I’m too old to make the same movie twice, and I have other stories I want to tell,” he noted on Total Sci-Fi Online.

The filmmaker also made it clear that he did not agree with another version of his project being made:

If a’remake’ is made, it is because the original is bad. And mine is not.

Reeves himself acknowledged his admiration for the original film and also that, initially, he did not agree with making the’remake’. However, things changed when reading Lindqvist’s book. “I said… we shouldn’t do a remake. Read the book, and I was very captivated and intrigued by how personal the story was. I thought John Lindqvist had written a great story and adapted it for the film. Wrote to Lindqvist, and I told him that it’s not just that I was drawn to the story because it was a brilliant story, but also because of the personal aspect of it. “It reminds me of my childhood.”

DESPITE EVERYTHING, A GOOD ‘REMAKE’

Reeves, when adapting the story, set it in the United States during the time of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, the same as the novel, which takes place in Sweden. They asked the director to change the age of the protagonists, but he refused: “That would ruin the essence of the story and change it completely. We need that innocence.””

For the protagonists, Reeves cast Chloë Grace Moretz as the vampire Abby and Kodi Smit-McPhee as the human Owen. For the adult companion of the protagonist, the filmmaker counted on Richard Jenkins.

The result was not bad at all. The film received positive reviews. The consensus, as noted by Rotten Tomatoes, was: “Similar to the original in every positive way, but with enough changes to make it stand on its own. Let Me In is that rare Hollywood’remake’ that doesn’t insult the inspiration.”“.

Let Me In hit theaters in 2010, and Alfredson had this to say in 2011 on IndieWire: “It was a little jarring when I found out because I was still working on marketing my own version. So it was a little quick. It’s a very personal thing to work with a book for several years. You think it’s yours, and you fight a lot for it, and then you hear that someone else dances with your girlfriend. It’s strange, but I heard it’s a good movie, and they did a great job, so there’s no hard feelings.“.

However, he also made statements shortly after, in 2012, that seemed to invalidate that last part of his words. “I think there’s something dishonest about copying someone’s work. I think it’s a lot more powerful if you do something personal that’s original,” she told the Wall Street Journal.

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