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This is definitely true, but I still don't really agree with me having had a prejudice against Let the Right One In. I didn't watch that movie thinking that it was likely to suck. I wasn't too enthusiastic about what I saw, but that is neither a bias nor a prejudice. However it is very much a bias when some folks (like joseph, but no offense!) say that a Hollywood remake would definitely be shit. Now with that kind of opinion in mind, it's hard to approach such a remake (if any ever comes out) with an open mind.

Perhaps the word 'expectation' would be worth using here. I'm definitely agreeing with Joseph, in fact there is nothing in his post just above that I would disagree with. After seeing many Hollywood remakes, my expectations about them are quite low and usually unenthusiastic. That is certainly not prejudice, it is an educated guess based on many previous experiences. However, in the rare instance when Hollywood does get it right, I'd be more than happy to heap praise where it is due.

I just finished reading the novel on which this movie is based. I thought you might be interested in some of my thoughts on it.

The book and movie are different, but both interesting. I don't even really want to say that one is better than the other, although if I had to choose I'd probably go with the movie. But they complement each other in really interesting ways, and the novel was a really compelling read, even though I knew all the major plot points from having seen the movie.

SPOILERS AHEAD - for both the movie and the book. I will discuss things that are different in the book, so you might consider them spoilers even if you have seen the movie.

One major difference in the book is that the character of Hakan (the man who lives with Eli) is much more developed. We find out about his history, how he met Eli, and his motivations for staying with her.

In the movie, he dies when he falls out of the window of the hospital, and that's the end of his story. But in the novel, the story takes on a radically different turn at that point. The novel explains that the vampire infection can live on even if the human body dies. Whenever vampires feed on someone, they have to kill them quickly before the infection takes hold. Because once they are infected, you basically can't kill them. With Hakan, the infection had already taken hold by the time he fell to his death twelve storeys below. He then turns into a kind of vampire/zombie - everything that is horrific and monster-like about the vampire, but without a human conscience to guide it.

In the movie, it's maybe hinted at that this character has a thing for young boys, but never explicitly so. In the book, there is absolutely no doubt that the character is a pedophile. While I was weary of this at first (it's easy to make a villain an evil pedophile so people feel no pity for him), it was actually handled in a much more sophisticated way than I expected.

There are almost no completely evil characters in the book, with the possible exception of the sadists who castrated Elias and made him into a vampire (this is something we find out in brief flashbacks). All the other "villains" are portrayed in such a way that they are only villains from one perspective. This is the case with pedophile character - he's a murderer, but he doesn't really want to be. He's doing it because he's desperate and because he's in love with Eli. He is completely devoted to her and will go to any lengths to ensure her safety and well-being. That's actually an admirable trait. Only from the perspective of the victims and the other town folks does he appear as a villain or a monster (pre-infection, that is).

The same can be said of Eli: She's obviously a very sympathetic character, but from the perspective of some of the other characters, she's a monster who killed one of their friends and infected another.

Or the bullies: Jonny is a sadistic bully who relentlessly tortures Oskar. His behaviour is inexcusable. And yet, he's also portrayed as a victim of his upbringing. In the book, there are very moving scenes about his relationship to his brother and their absent father. All they have from him is a photo album, which gets destroyed in a fire that Oskar starts at the school. These extra details humanize the bullies and even explains why they decide to go after Oskar at the end. Oskar has destroyed something that was extremely valuable to them, so you can understand their rage and desire for revenge (even if ultimately you're probably still siding with Oskar).

I think the author's intention was to create a portrait of a town, in which characters clash with each other but there is no concept of evil. It's a very relativistic moral. Ultimately, everyone is just trying to deal with their pain and suffering in the best way they can, even if doing so causes them to inflict more pain on other people. And I think the fact that the author chose to make one of these characters a pedophile - generally the most universally hated and demonized criminal type our society can come up with - is very telling as to his intentions. He shows that even the pedophile, which society thinks of as the ultimate monster, is essentially a good person.

Only when the pedophile dies does he finally turn into the monster that society imagines he is. Basically, the way I interpret his transformation is that, as a pedophile, he had this intense physical desire for Eli. But as a human being, this desire was filtered through his emotions (mainly love) and his reasoning (he's willingly controlling his desire because Eli doesn't reciprocate his feelings and he respects that, etc.). Once the human being in him dies, only that desire is left. And coupled with the vampire infection's insatiable predatory instinct, he becomes the worst possible monster imaginable - a crazy, unstoppable, child-molesting vampire/zombie predator with an eternally erect thingy!! If that's not a materialization/projection of society's worse nightmares and fears about pedophilia, I don't know what is!

(I'll continue in the next post, as my full review is longer than the character limit for individual posts on this forum.)

Nice piece of information, thank you very much for sharing your thoughts.

The info of Eli actually having been a boy is a very intruiging aside to the whole story.

The novel sounds better than the movie was, imo.

josephk wrote on 28. May 2009 at 16:01:

wow. 

I've always wondered what the heck that was all about.  That, and why it never made the blond kid ask more questions when Eli said "I'm not a girl" or whatever.  I thought it just meant: "I'm a vampire, which can't really be classified as a boy or girl."

And the closeup of Eli, well that *didn't* really tell me he was a castrated boy.  I was like "what the heck is that?  it's horizontal!" Not having read many vampire books (maybe none)... I thought that was just another one of those hidden little facts about "female" vampires!

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Well, I did. I figured out that Eli was a boy before I had started reading the novel. (I didn't get it right away, but upon discussing it with the friend who had seen the film with me at the cinema, we pretty much came to that conclusion, after which I confirmed it by doing research on the book.)

Just because something is not stated explicitly or made very obvious in a movie doesn't mean it's not important. In my opinion, the fact that one character appears to be a girl but is in fact a boy is more than an aside, and no matter how subtle it may be or how many people miss it, it doesn't make it any less important and central to the story. It does a lot more than just cause you to reinterpret one or two scenes. It changes everything: the psychology, background and motivations of the characters, their relationship and the thematic implications of it.

To be fair, though, I do agree the close-up is confusing. It also flashes by pretty quickly, so in a threatre, you can't pause, rewind, study it and think about what the hell it is you're seeing. But it's shown that way because Oskar only gets a glimpse of it. So it's ambiguous. But I think it's good for movies to be ambiguous. Ideally, a scene like that will not spell everything out for you immediately, but it should at least cause you to wonder and try to work things out for yourself, and then maybe watch the movie again once you have. That's what it did for me. But I made the extra effort because I thought the movie was good and that there was a lot going on underneath the surface. You dismissed the movie as boring, shallow and poorly acted, so I guess it didn't inspire you to think about it any further.

Fair enough, joseph

You're probably right, once I had made up my mind about not liking this film too much, I guess I closed my mind for further investigations and pondering.