Let The Right One In Actually Makes The Vampire Scary - And Deserving of Pity - Again

 

 

    Ever since Dracula was written, popular culture has been fascinated with the idea of the vampire. In its best adaptations – Bela Lugosi’s version; both the silent and modern versions of Nosferatu  - the true horror of the vampire and the evil it represents has been a constant through much of the 20^th century.

Starting in the 1990s, our variations began to change. Anne Rice added eroticism. Joss Whedon turned them into equal measures of fear and isolation – which was lost by the fascination of their sexuality. At one point in the late 2000s and early 2010s, TV and the movies showed them in equal measures as pure eroticism (True Blood) and symbols of chastity (Twilight). The most recent success about them What We Do In The Shadows has turned into hilariously inept morons.

All of this de-mystification may make the vampires more human, but by doing so it is taken away much of the terror and dread they once demonstrated. The question for many years has been: can the vampire ever be terrifying again? This October, two quite different TV adaptations of classic vampire novels and movies are attempting to answer that very question. In this review, I intend to focus on Let the Right One In because in the last twenty years, it may be the one example of a book and film that did everything its power not only make us empathize with the vampire while doing nothing to make them any less terrifying.

Let The Right One In was written by John Ajvide Linquist, a Swedish novelist. Adapted in Norway by him and Tomas Alfredson in 2008, it is one of the most terrifying horror movies ever made. It centers on Oskar, a twelve-year old who is bullied constantly. One day he befriends a twelve-year old girl named Eli, who just moved in next door. What he does not know until its too late to change things is that Eli is a vampire. In one of the most haunting quotes in movie history she tells him: “I’ve been twelve for a very long time.”  The man who is claiming to be her father is just the latest in a long line of familiars. I will not reveal the truth, except to say that Lindquist doesn’t deviate or alleviate for a second what it truly means to be immortal. We may all wish for it at some point – to never grow up – but Lindquist tells us this is the opposite of Neverland.

The movie enjoyed huge critical success and a modest success in America. Naturally, it was adapted by Hollywood in Let Me In less than two years after the original. Matt Reeves was very faithful to the original and did not deviate from the story or the tone. (Horror is the only genre that Hollywood does not try as hard to push for an optimistic ending. It is an exceptionally good adaptation of an exceptionally good book, but it premiered at the height of the fervor over Twilight and as we all know, good vampires always triumph over real ones.

Now more than a decade after the original adaptation, Showtime has decided to turn into an original series. Perhaps for obvious reasons it has widened the scope slightly than either adaptation of the film, but the basic plot is still there and the necessary alterations have at least so far done nothing to take away the feeling of dread.

The setting has been moved to New York, as Mark has just moved into a brownstone with his daughter. In this Mark is Eleanor’s father and that makes what we see him do infinitely worse. Mark’s wife died ten years ago and he and his daughter left the city. Now they have returned after a decade of moving from place to place. Mark finds a restaurant where his foster brother Zeke (Kevin Carroll) owns a restaurant. Zeke is not happy to see Mark at all, and not much happier to give him a job even though we learn that this restaurant was originally supposed to have his.

The series does not hide Eleanor’s secret for long, even for those who know nothing about the original source material. The touches it adds are far more haunting. Eleanor is touching the window and letting her finger smoke, She watches the phone for the sunset. She loves science, stars, and wants to make friends. Then she goes outside and she makes one, Isaiah. “Aren’t you cold?” he asked her. And he’s puzzled when he offers a candy bar and she says: “I don’t eat chocolate.”

We actually meet Isaiah before Eleanor. His mother is Naomi Cole (Akani Nomi Rose, known to film fans for Dreamgirls and The Good Wife by me) Naomi knows how hard things are for her son and spends much of the first two episodes acting like the typical helicopter parent, not wanting her estranged husband to talk to him and warning him about doing magic tricks. Part of it seems to do with a string of murders that she is investigating that are so brutal Penn Station is seen empty at the beginning of the film. (As a New Yorker, this is the only part of the series I don’t believe.) But as we see, just as in the book and movies, Isaiah is constantly being bullied in ways that make you remember just how horrible adolescent boys can be. Is it anyone he gravitates to anyone who offers friendliness, especially someone as isolated as Eleanor has lived the last ten years?

Mark is played by Damian Bichir, who broke on to the national consciousness with his surprise Oscar nomination for A Better Life and never left it. (He has a previous connection to Showtime, having spent three seasons on Weeds. ) The series goes out of its way to show that Mark is a good father who loves her daughter and will do anything to protect her and try to help her. But it doesn’t back away from the fact what that involves – at the end of the pilot, he threatens a man he thinks might be to help him cure his daughter and when he doesn’t tell him what he wants to her, slits his throat to provide blood for her. Last night’s episode opens with him using his skills as a chef, to dissect and hide the body of his victim with such utter detachment that you don’t need a word for him to know how routine this has become for him over the past decade.

Now I must tell you of the addition to this plot. In the opening scene of the episode we see an aging man telling his son that he’s about to see his first sunrise in ten years. He looks on it for a moment then the son bursts into flames. Not long after, he calls his daughter Claire (Grace Gummer, another of Meryl’s acting wunderkind) The two are estranged and even after her father tells her he’s dying of pancreatic cancer, she is reluctant to meet with him. Her father is portrayed by Zeljko Ivanek, looking feeble and menacing at the same time. We learn that he was once a giant in the painkiller industry but when the world learned how addictive it was – something he still claims he knew nothing about but Claire never believed and still doesn’t – he lost almost everything. Claire is angry with him because ten years ago, her brother was attacked by a wild animal and by the time she came to the funeral, her brother had already been buried. Her father has been lying about this all that time, of course, but while he is a scientific genius, he refuses to accept the idea that his son can be something out of Bram Stoker. It does not stop him from using his son’s blood to experiment on monkeys and the nature of how he has been supplying blood for his victims, both of which Claire witnesses in a horrifying fashion in the second episode. She has agreed to take over the care for her brother, mainly because she does not believe in her father’s approach. The question is, how far will she go to save him?

I have introduced you to the main characters. There are links between all three families. If you have seen the series so far, you know what they are but if you haven’t, I will not reveal them nor the overriding theme that may be the link between all of them because that is still theoretical. I will only say that, in addition to being a genuinely scary and sad show, Let the Right One In asks the question: What would you do to protect your children? I think that’s the real reason Mark is Eleanor’s father because just as in the case of Naomi and Claire, all of them take on burdens to protect the people they love. Some are horribly more extreme than others, but they are based in the same fundamental instinct that led Walter White and Marty Byrde to use just the most prominent examples, did when they inflicted horrors among countless lives. Mark is far more human than these two – there is a scene at his wife’s grave where he reveals just how horrible it’s been the last ten years – but he is infinitely more ruthless and bloodthirsty. Had he the resources, you can see him doing the things that Peter Logan’s has done the past decade. It’s all a matter of degree.

Let the Right One In is  perfect for the network that has brought us Dexter and Yellowjackets, series that have at their core characters who have killed to fill a basic need and where the leads have been lying about those secrets for their entire adult lives. And just like the latter series, the actors playing the children at the center of it – Madison Taylor Baez and Ian Forman are perfect at playing children who have had, for horrible reasons to grow up too fast. Of course, they are drawn to each other. We all want human connection, even those of us who only vaguely remember being human. Based on the plot of the original, it’s inevitable that Eleanor will find herself protecting Isaiah and the consequences will be horrible – in a sense, we already know what Eleanor is capable of. There is hope for some of the characters in this series in a way none of the previous adaptations have allowed for, but we all know from everything the horror genre and Peak TV have taught us, that none of this is gained without a price. We’ve already seen what it’s cost Mark and Eleanor. The question is, how much will everyone else have to suffer? How much blood would you shed to help the one you loved?

My Score: 4.5 stars.