Movies
‘Let Me In’ Dark and Scarier Than ‘Twilight’
After kissing Twilight‘s arse for way too long, director Matt Reeves reveals in an interview over at MTV that Let Me In, his English-language redo of Let The Right One In, will be much darker and scarier than the Stephenie Meyers’ adaptation. It sure as hell better be! Beyond the break you can read a few tid-bits from the interview. Overture Films has slated Let Me In for release on October 1, 2010.
One of the main things I know readers are worried about is how different this will be from the original. Reeves says he’ll find his own piece to bring to the tale:
“One of the things I really wanted to do was find my own way into the story while still being very, very reverent to the beautiful film and to the wonderful story that they created,” Reeves tells MTV. “And so the story in many ways follows the same trajectory. I really wanted to put you, even more so, into the point of view of the boy and understand his childhood as vividly as it comes across in the book.”
On avoiding comparison to TWILIGHT:
“I think that it has obviously really touched a nerve and tapped into a very, very deep vein. To me, the thing about genre stories that is the most interesting thing is what you do with the metaphor of the genre. You can do a grand, sweeping love story, like “Twilight,” and use that metaphor of the two people that are just being torn apart and the aching-ness of it, and that’s a great fantasy. I think that what people respond to in “Twilight” is the fantasy of it. It’s such a grand, romantic fantasy, and in a way, the reason why I think there is room for a film like ours is, though it’s a vampire film, it uses it in such a different way.”
He continues, “Whereas “Twilight” is kind of a fantasy, this will be a darker, scarier kind of journey. Obviously, “True Blood” is also really big these days too, and that’s a different thing using the sexual side. I think it’s really about what sort of emphasis the story takes and how you use the metaphor. The amazing thing about genre films is the way to smuggle in different kinds of themes and things worthy of exploration. I think what so struck me about this story is that what it is exploring is so different and so real.“
Universal has been having a hell of a time getting their Universal Monsters brand back on a better path in the wake of the Dark Universe collapsing, with four movies thus far released in the years since The Mummy attempted to get that interconnected universe off the ground.
First was Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man, to date the only post-Mummy hit for the Universal Monsters, followed by The Last Voyage of the Demeter, Renfield, and now Abigail. The latter three films have attempted to bring Dracula back to the screen in fresh ways, but both Demeter and Renfield severely underperformed at the box office. And while Abigail is a far better vampire movie than those two, it’s unfortunately also struggling to turn a profit.
Where does the Universal Monsters brand go from here? The good news is that Universal and Blumhouse have once again enlisted the help of Leigh Whannell for their upcoming Wolf Man reboot, which is howling its way into theaters in January 2025. This is good news, of course, because Whannell’s Invisible Man was the best – and certainly most profitable – of the post-Dark Universe movies that Universal has been able to conjure up. The film ended its worldwide run with $144 million back in 2020, a massive win considering the $7 million budget.
Given the film was such a success, you may wondering why The Invisible Man 2 hasn’t come along in these past four years. But the wait for that sequel may be coming to an end.
Speaking with the Happy Sad Confused podcast this week, The Invisible Man star Elisabeth Moss notes that she feels “very good” about the sequel’s development at this point in time.
“Blumhouse and my production company [Love & Squalor Pictures]… we are closer than we have ever been to cracking it,” Moss updates this week. “And I feel very good about it.”
She adds, “We are very much intent on continuing that story.”
At the end of the 2020 movie, Elisabeth Moss’s heroine Cecilia Kass uses her stalker’s high-tech invisibility suit to kill him, now in possession of the technology that ruined her life.
Stay tuned for more on The Invisible Man 2 as we learn it.
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