One of the best vampire movies of the past decade was Swedish film Let The Right One In, about a young bullied boy who meets and falls for a young girl who moves into his building, who isn’t really as young as she seems. (Pssst… she’s a vampire.) The film received critical acclaim upon its release and became and instant cult classic. It was remade in America (pretty faithfully, too) just two years later as Let Me In, and even became a successful stage play in the U.K. (The original title, and also the name of the book it was based on, was a reference to a song by Morrissey, giving it even more cool points.)
Now the A&E network is teaming with Teen Wolf showrunner Jeff Davis and actor-screenwriter Brandon Boyce to adapt the movie into a television series. According to the official description, “the drama follows the boy and female vampire, who lives in secrecy with her mysterious guardian. When a series of strange murders pops up in their small Vermont town, it attracts the attention of a federal marshal with a mysterious past of his own.” That’s more or less the plot of the entire movie, so it’ll be interesting to see how they can stretch this out for eight to ten episodes. Between this show, Bates Motel and the remake of the French zombie drama The Returned, A&E is quickly finding its niche with horror based television.
The original novel has some more controversial elements that the film versions barely dealt with, mostly about the relationship with the young female vampire and her guardian (and in the case of Matt Reeve’s American adaptation, didn’t deal with at all), so it will be interesting to see if the TV show will “go there,” as they say. Television is more daring than movies these days after all. No date has been given for when A&E would like the show to premiere, but I expect we’ll be hearing a lot more about this one very soon.
I don’t see this going as well as Bates Motel but I can see them stretching the plot out into a full season. The original didn’t pull any punches and the US remake scaled down the plot into a more of ‘show,don’t tell” type of retelling although the main points are still there. I think A&E is going to try to find a middle ground leaning more towards the US and occasionally throw in the more brutal parts of the original but I’m hesitant to trust in someone associated with Teen Wolf.
I think if they are pulling directly from the book and compose the episodes similarly to the way the book is written (character chapters), it could easily make a full season. Also assuming they stick with the book’s mood and pace it well. The book really focuses on troubling issues of humanity and I’m hoping they will portray as much of that as they can and do it in the same subtle way they did in the book (not having characters say what you could be picking up on your own and doing the reflecting for you). The original film did a pretty good job of this even though they left a ton out. The American version took every opportunity to make the movie into a horror film. I feel like HBO could make this into a quality mini series but I definitely feel the same way about the Teen Wolf show runner.
^run on sentences for days.
Psst. ‘She’ really isn’t as she seems – because she’s not a girl.