Let Me In (2010) is Matt Reeves’s American vampire film for the revived Hammer, built on Lindqvist’s novel and its Swedish film. Everything about it says flop-in-waiting: an English-language do-over of a Swedish masterpiece barely two years old, handed to the Cloverfield director, sold on two child actors most of America had never heard of. Then the reviews landed, and they were the best any horror film got all year. Then America stayed home anyway. This page is about the strangest split in modern horror: the remake that did almost everything right, in front of almost nobody.
Quick Specs
- Director: Matt Reeves
- Screenplay: Matt Reeves
- Based on: the novel and screenplay Låt den rätte komma in by John Ajvide Lindqvist
- Producers: Simon Oakes, Guy East, Nigel Sinclair, Donna Gigliotti, Alex Brunner, Tobin Armbrust, John Nordling, Carl Molinder
- Editor: Stan Salfas
- Music: Michael Giacchino
- Production companies: Hammer Films and EFTI, under Exclusive Media Group
- Distributors: Overture Films (United States); Icon Film Distribution (United Kingdom)
- Première: Toronto International Film Festival, September 2010
- Released: United States, 1 October 2010; United Kingdom, 5 November 2010
- Running time: about 116 minutes (some listings give 115)
- Rating: R — strong bloody horror violence, language and a brief sexual situation
- Budget: $20 million
- Setting: Los Alamos, New Mexico, March 1983
The invitation, translated
Start with the book, because both films do. Låt den rätte komma in (2004) was John Ajvide Lindqvist’s debut novel, and in 2008 Lindqvist adapted it himself for the Swedish film Let the Right One In, directed by Tomas Alfredson. That film became the kind of word-of-mouth phenomenon publicists dream about and cannot buy. Hammer acquired the English-language remake rights at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival, where the Swedish film had just won the Founders Award for Best Narrative Feature — and interest in an English version had, in fact, begun back in 2007, before the original was even released.
The crossings rename everything. Oskar becomes Owen. Eli becomes Abby. Blackeberg, Stockholm becomes Los Alamos, New Mexico. And Håkan — Abby’s counterpart to him we will come back to — loses his name entirely. The title needs the same care. The novel’s Swedish title plays on Morrissey’s song “Let the Right One Slip In” and on the oldest rule in vampire folklore: a vampire cannot cross your threshold unless you invite it. That Morrissey connection belongs to the Swedish title, not to this film — “Let Me In” descends from the novel’s American edition, whose publishers judged the original title too long. Three words, and the invitation rule is inside every one of them.
Remake, re-adaptation, or both
Here is the argument this film will never escape, and this page is not going to settle it for you, because the record doesn’t. The official credit line bases the film on Lindqvist’s novel and the Swedish film. Reeves’s stated position, relayed by Lindqvist, was that he would make a new film from the book rather than remake the Swedish film. A number of critics looked at the finished picture — its structure, its set pieces, its faithfulness to Alfredson’s version — and called it a direct remake anyway. Both framings are on the record; anyone who prints only one of them as settled fact is selling you something.
What is not contested: Hammer first offered the job to Alfredson, and he turned it down in terms that left no door open — “I am too old to make the same film twice and I have other stories that I want to tell.” He has remained publicly against the remake’s existence. Reeves, hired to write and direct, was asked to age the child leads up and refused, on the grounds that it “would ruin the essence of the story.” He also kept his two young actors away from the Swedish film before shooting — whatever Owen and Abby were going to be, they would not be imitations.
The story
Los Alamos, New Mexico, March 1983 — the film tells you so on screen. A disfigured man is carried into hospital; a policeman tries to question him about a recent murder, steps out to take a call, and the man goes out of the window, leaving a note behind: “I’M SORY ABBY.”
Two weeks earlier: Owen is twelve, invisible to his divorcing parents and hunted at school by Kenny and two friends. A barefoot girl and an older man move into the flat next door. The children find each other — Morse code tapped through the apartment wall — and Abby urges Owen to hit back, and promises to protect him. The man beside her, meanwhile, is abducting local teenagers and draining their blood into a jug for her. When he spills a whole harvest, a starving Abby kills a neighbour herself. When he is caught hiding in a victim’s car and the car rolls, he pours concentrated sulfuric acid over his own face rather than be taken and named — the disfigured man of the opening, arriving at his appointment with the window.
What follows is the story’s cold heart, told straight: the hospital visit, the fall, the girl at Owen’s window insisting he say the invitation aloud. Owen, emboldened, splits Kenny’s ear open with a metal pole on a school trip. A blood pact goes wrong in a flash of fangs. Virginia, a neighbour Abby feeds on but fails to kill, burns in her hospital bed when a nurse opens the curtains. Abby walks into Owen’s flat uninvited to show him the price of entry — and bleeds from every pore until he speaks the words. The policeman forces his way into her flat and finds her asleep. And at swim class, with Owen held under the water by Kenny, his brother Jimmy and their friends, Abby comes back for him. Some time later a train leaves Los Alamos, and in a large trunk aboard it, something taps in Morse code.
The Father has no name
Richard Jenkins plays Abby’s adult companion, and here is a detail the reference books keep getting wrong, so get it right here: he is credited as the Father. Not a name — a function. Some listings call the character “Thomas”; that is not his credit and it is not what this film gives him. In the Swedish film the counterpart is Håkan, a man with a name. Here the man is never given the dignity of one, and the credit is the film keeping its own bleak promise: he exists only in relation to her. Elias Koteas is likewise credited as the Policeman — not a detective, whatever the summaries say — and he doubles, uncredited in most memories of the film, as the voice of Owen’s father on the phone.
The children: Kodi Smit-McPhee is Owen, Chloë Grace Moretz is Abby — note the spellings, because secondary coverage mangles both. Both play twelve-year-olds; neither quite was. Moretz, born 10 February 1997, was twelve throughout the shoot (November 2009 to January 2010) and thirteen by the American release — not eleven, as at least one listicle would have it. Smit-McPhee, born 13 June 1996, was thirteen during filming and fourteen at release. Around them: Cara Buono as Owen’s mother, Sasha Barrese as Virginia, Dylan Minnette as Kenny, Ritchie Coster as Mr. Zorić. Production began in Albuquerque on 2 November 2009 and wrapped that January, shooting across New Mexico, Los Alamos itself included.
Evil on the television
The film’s 1983 is not wallpaper. In its opening minutes, a hospital television carries Ronald Reagan’s 8 March 1983 address — the famous “evil empire” speech — and precision matters here, because this detail is misreported constantly: the passage that names the Soviet Union an evil empire is not heard in the film. What the film uses are two other excerpts from that speech — the passage about sin and evil in the world, and the Tocqueville passage — cut together out of order. The speech is in the film. The soundbite is not.
Reeves has said why it’s there: the speech stands for an era’s American thinking, in which evil is something outside, “over there,” the Soviets — set against a twelve-year-old in that same America, in that same month, lying awake wishing he could kill the boys who torment him. The vampire next door is not the only thing in this film that has to be invited in.
Hammer, Overture, and the distributor that vanished
The corporate story is genuinely messy, and this page will draw it no cleaner than the record supports. The revived Hammer, under Exclusive Media Group, produced the film with Sweden’s EFTI — the company behind the original — and the original’s own producers, John Nordling and Carl Molinder, produced alongside Hammer’s team. Reeves’s hiring was announced in 2008 as the first picture under a two-film co-production, financing and distribution agreement between Overture Films and Exclusive Media Group.
Overture Films is the American distributor of record — every box-office carrier lists Overture alone. But on 23 July 2010, ten weeks before the film opened, Relativity Media acquired Overture’s marketing and distribution operation from Starz, and Overture was shut down. That transaction — not any production role — is why Relativity’s name appears alongside Overture’s in some listings, and why Hammer’s Simon Oakes described the American release as going through “Overture Relativity.” In Britain, Icon Film Distribution released the film (one reference work also names Paramount for the UK; no second carrier supports it, and Hammer’s CEO names Icon — so Icon is what this page prints). One more correction while we’re here: this is often called the first film of the revived Hammer. Per Oakes, Hammer shot a slate at the same time and The Resident was actually shot before this one — Let Me In simply reached release first because the American partner was ready.
The critics said yes
The reception, in numbers first: Rotten Tomatoes stands at 88% for this film. Read that twice, because the internet will try to hand you 98% — that figure, and the 90% paired with it, belong to the Swedish film, and lifting them for the remake is the single most common error in this film’s afterlife. Metacritic gives it 79 from 35 critic reviews, with not one outright negative notice among them — and both Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic counted it the best-reviewed horror film of 2010, and among the year’s ten best-reviewed wide releases. At the Saturn Awards it won Best Horror Film, and Moretz won Best Performance by a Younger Actor.
The voices matched the numbers. A. O. Scott: “what makes Let Me In so eerily fascinating is the mood it creates. It is at once artful and unpretentious.” Roger Ebert: Reeves “understands what made the first film so eerie and effective, and here the same things work again.” Peter Travers owned that he went in expecting “a crass desecration” and reversed himself completely: “Prepare to be wowed. It’s a spellbinder.” And Stephen King, in his best-of-2010 writing, went furthest of all: “Let Me In is a genre-busting triumph. Not just a horror film, but the best American horror film in the last 20 years.”
The dissent deserves its sentence, because a page that only quotes the love is a poster, not a page. Mark Kermode called it “the most utterly redundant remake of the year,” and Sukhdev Sandhu wrote that what was missing was “the alluring otherness” of the Swedish film. Rotten Tomatoes’ own consensus threads the needle both camps left: “Similar to the original in all the right ways — but with enough changes to stand on its own — Let Me In is the rare Hollywood remake that doesn’t add insult to inspiration.”
The money nobody showed up for
And now the other half of the split. The budget is the one clean number in this film’s finances: $20 million, agreed by every carrier. The American gross is agreed to the dollar as well: $12,134,935. It opened on 1 October 2010 at number eight with $5,147,479, in roughly two thousand theatres — widest release 2,042 — and finished fifth among the ten lowest-grossing wide releases of its year. One of the best-reviewed films of 2010; one of its weakest theatrical performers. Both halves of that sentence are documented, and neither cancels the other.
The worldwide total is where this page refuses to tidy up after the record. Box Office Mojo’s current figure is $27,093,592, and that is the form to print — attributed, as here. An older Box Office Mojo figure of $24,145,613 still circulates through scrapes and older articles, and a third implied total of roughly $28.3 million can be derived from another carrier’s domestic-share percentage. Three numbers, one film; anyone who gives you a single worldwide gross for Let Me In without telling you whose it is has tidied the evidence on your behalf. The film’s second life began on North American DVD and Blu-ray on 1 February 2011, with a Reeves commentary among the extras.
Lindqvist gets the last word, because he earned it twice over. He called himself possibly “the luckiest writer alive” to have two excellent versions of his debut novel, said this one “stands firmly on its own legs,” and wrote that, like the Swedish film, it made him cry — “but not at the same points.” The audience that skipped it in October 2010 has been finding it ever since, one invitation at a time.