How do you reinvent the vampire movie? Well you could move the action from Transylvania to Scandinavia. Get a comedy veteran to direct it. Make the vampire a girl. DONALD CLARKEon a sensational new film.
'AH, FRESH FRUIT. How delicious." Tomas Alfredson – polite, middle-aged, Swedish – does not have the look of a fellow who's just set loose a sensation. But it is accurate to describe Let the Right One In in those terms.
Based on an admired novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist, Alfredson’s film details the relationship between Oskar, an introverted young boy, and Eli, the vampire girl who lives next door.
Bullied at school, Oskar becomes increasingly attached to the ancient waif and, as the film progresses, comes to terms with her nocturnal bloodlust. As much an exercise in period naturalism as a horror film – the picture is set in a grim corner of Stockholm during the early 1980s – Let the Right One Inhas become one of the most praised pictures of the past year. If it isa horror film, then it may be the best we have seen this century.
“I have been directing films and television for 20 years and you are always surprised when you get strong feelings,” Alfredson says. “So this was a very big surprise. You have to remember that it was a matter of timing and of luck. And, of course, it’s a fantastic book.”
Wearing a formal jacket, expensive-looking trousers and stern, horn-rimmed spectacles, Alfredson could pass as a diplomat in some lofty rim of the EU. He plucks a fork and considers whether to spear a blackberry or a strawberry. “I am not usually interested in these kind of stories,” he says, dipping his chosen berry in yoghurt. “So I am totally uneducated in vampire films or in stories relating to them. I am mostly known for doing comedy. But I thought it was a very strong approach to the subject of bullying. When I was at this age I also had some troubles at school. I thought I was the loneliest child in the world, but maybe not.”
Alfredson’s ignorance of previous vampire films has allowed him to fashion an entirely original approach to the subject. The lacy, sub-Llewelyn-Bowen Gothicism of Anne Rice has been jettisoned for an unflinching examination of the grimy logistics of butchery and blood-letting. Bodies are strung from trees like slaughtered pigs. Pipes and funnels are used in the draining of plasma.
I am surprised that Alfredson didn't dig out some vampire films just to make sure what not to do. He might have accidentally ripped off Nosferatuwithout knowing it.
“No. I thought that too many film-makers these days watch films and they end up copying one another. I try to inspire myself through other things like music or literature. It’s better that I don’t see too much. I think I have seen Bela Lugosi on television. But I am very uneducated in that area.”
So is his drift away from the traditional, more romantic notion of vampirism an accident? If he doesn’t know the conventions he can hardly consciously work against them.
“I don’t know. As I understand it, the traditional notion of a vampire is an evil creature. Eli is not an evil creature. She is a good-hearted one. Unlike the bullies, she has to do what she does. She has no choice. The bullies chose what to do. She is good-hearted, but compelled to cruelty. There is also traditionally an erotic aspect to the vampire, I understand. Whereas there is, I think, no sex here at all.”
Alfredson remembers a childhood spent, at least in part, imagining himself the loneliest boy in the world. But when he talks about the details it doesn’t sound like such a bad life. His father, Hans Alfredson, is a distinguished actor, writer and director, who worked with Ingmar Bergman and wrote many novels.
“I was brought up on different film sets since I was born,” he says. “I didn’t think of anything else to do but film. My brother is also a film director. It was, also, a chance to get closer to my dad. It was a way to have something to talk about with him.”
He admits that, though his upbringing was comfortable enough, he hated "being a child". After leaving school, he trained as a film editor and formed a comedy group – still in existence – called Killinggänget. Indeed, there is little that Alfredson has not done in the business. In an earlier interview he told the journalist that, after finishing the first batch of press for Let the Right One In, he was heading off to direct a production of My Fair Lady. Given his background in comedy, I wondered if he might have been joking.
“Not at all,” he says. “We did it in Swedish, which was very strange, but I think it worked quite well.”
So how on earth did he end up persuading Lindqvist to let him direct Let the Right One In? He admits that, following the success of the novel, producers were battering the writer's door down. Every sane director in Sweden wanted to get his hands on the material.
“We had a meeting,” he says in his dry Scandinavian way. “John had seen some of my work. This is his first book and he just didn’t know how to deal with the success. We talked and what I said made sense to him.”
The two men clearly developed a very effective partnership. Unlike too many recent adaptations of popular books (see this week's Screenwriter), the script for Let the Right One Insheds many significant incidents and themes from the source, but makes sure to retain "the fillet of the story".
“I, at first, hated the idea that John was going to co-write the screenplay,” Alfredson says. “It is not always a great idea to have the novelist write the screenplay. It can be too painful, particularly as this is an autobiographical story. These days when they adapt a popular book they just take a little of every scene, so that every reader will be satisfied. We preferred to just cut out the fillet.”
The most significant changes involve the relationship between Eli and the middle-aged man with whom she travels. In the book it is made clear that this character is a paedophile and (hold onto your stomachs) that Eli is, in fact, a boy who has had his penis chopped off. The audience for the film can still draw those conclusions, but explicit pointers have been removed.
“That is correct,” Alfredson says. “I think paedophilia is used these days as a sort of emotional special effect. If you have to have some genuinely creepy thing you bring that in and leave it at that. I think you should take a more responsible approach to that subject. If we had brought paedophilia in I would have been forced to treat it in depth and the film would have become all about that. It would have thrown a gigantic shadow over everything.”
A large part of the film's sinister appeal is tied up with its grim setting. Though Let the Right One Incould have been set at any point in history, Alfredson believes that a contemporary version – with mobile phones and access to the internet – would have allowed the characters less space to develop. But he didn't want to indulge in cheap nostalgia. There are no recognisable pop hits on the radio.
“No. Actually I asked Per Gessle, who was in the group Roxette, to write a song that sounded like it was released in the 1980s to play in the background. It is true that the time and place are very important.”
Still, that won’t stop Hollywood moving the action to Cleveland (or wherever). Following Let the Right One In’s success at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival, where it won the best narrative feature award, the remake rights were, indeed, snapped up. Matt Reeves, director of Cloverfield, will be behind the camera, and the film is set for release in 2010.
“When I heard about it I hated the idea,” he says. “When you work so hard on something you think you own it. It’s mine. I just hope they put tenderness and love into it. It would be sad to see it Americanised and simplified. But I suppose they do Hamlet all the time.” Avoid disappointment. See it in Swedish today.
HORROR SHOWS: YEARS OF FEAR
Is Let the Right One In the best horror film of the century so far? Many critics think so. Donald Clarke gives a decade-by-decade guide to the spookiest films ever
1910s
The Cabinet of Dr Caligari(1919)
You’d expect a German film made in the months following the end of the first World War to be somewhat downbeat. Robert Weine’s expressionist masterpiece, in which a somnabulist, acting under the instructions of a mad doctor, goes on a murder spree, is so stubbornly odd that it has rarely been imitated.
1920s
Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror(1922)
F W Murnau's unacknowledged adaptation of Stoker's Draculamakes stunning use of shadow, improvises some ingenious special effects and offers further indirect observations on Germany's post-war deprivations. It is, however, most notable for providing the weirdest version of the Count yet seen.
1930s
Bride of Frankenstein(1935)
The 1930s was, without doubt, the golden age of the American horror film. For all the virtues of masterpieces such as Freaks, Dracula, The Old Dark Houseand The Invisible Man, James Whale's Bride of Frankensteinstands out as a perfect blend of high culture and low humour. "Here's to a new world of gods and monsters."
1940s
Cat People(1942)
The Universal Studios horror film endured into the war years, but it had already become mired in pastiche. For real chills you had to look to the brilliant B-movies produced by the likes of Val Lewton. The cunningly economical Cat People, directed for Lewton by Jacques Tourneur, is just about the best of a fine bunch. Though I Walked with a Zombieis also pretty darn good.
1950s
Eyes Without a Face (1959)
In the 1950s science fiction elbowed American horror back into its cellar. Yet the decade did provide a singular French shocker that pointed the way towards the body horror of David Cronenberg (and inspired a Billy Idol hit). Georges Franju's Eyes Without a Face, in which a doctor grafts a new face onto his scarred daughter still makes us wince.
1960s
Night of the Living Dead (1968)
Yes, Polanski's Rosemary's Babyis a more complete film. (Does the same director's Repulsioncount as a horror flick?) But George Romero's low-budget zombie thriller stands as the canniest analysis of 1960s political and social discontent in popular American cinema. The sequels are all worth watching too.
1970s
The Exorcist (1973)
It's often vulgar. The special effects are now a bit creaky. And it ends by revealing the devil, hitherto supposed to be unimaginably cunning, as an easily deceived boob. Yet The Exorcist– particularly in its brilliant opening half – sticks in the psyche like few other commercial smashes. "Are they allowed to show that?" was a frequent response at the time.
1980s
The Shining (1980)
Forget the thrifty eccentricity of mid-period Cronenberg. Never mind the baroque fantasy of Dario Argento. The Shiningfinds Stanley Kubrick inflating an intimate domestic conflict into a pricey wide-screen epic whose very outrageousness is part of its appeal. Stephen King, author of the source novel, couldn't be doing with it. Sod him.
1990s
Audition (1999)
Western audiences finally woke up to Japanese horror at the century's turn when the likes of Hideo Nakata's Ringuand Takashi Miike's Auditionbroke into multiplexes. The latter film, in which a misused young woman cuts the guilty fellow to pieces, was said to have sent one viewer at the Irish Film Institute into such a state of shock that he had to be admitted to St James's Hospital.
2000s
Let The Right One In (2009)
