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"Movie Remakes - are there any good ones?"

Nin wrote:
I'd say the Swedish version wasn't a horror film and was better for it. Once you remove the ambiguity about Eli, she becomes a monster and the whole story becomes an unpleasant study in manipulation and fear with a very downbeat ending, which is exactly what Let Me In was.
Instead of a realistic take on the vampire story, a study in childhood loneliness and an ambiguity letting people make up their own minds, Let Me In reverts to Eli = Bad, Oskar = Manipulated. No room for discussion, everything is defined, simplistic and nowhere near as interesting.
The Hakan/Eli relationship in Let Me In might have been the only thing I enjoyed about it, which is a problem because you're not meant to support them. That relationship is meant to make you uncomfortable, not only because the focus should be on Eli/Oskar, but because it foreshadows their future too.

But Eli is a monster, but not of her own making. The scene in in the book in which he is 'turned' is truly horrifying and although Matt Reeves did shoot a toned down recreation of it for Let Me In it (probably wisely) never made the final cut. What this event did for me though was made me begin to accept that Eli was a victim too (something perhaps really not all that apparent in either of the film versions?). She has been forced into becoming something she really has not been at all comfortable with in order to survive. The intimate parts of her relationship with Hakan in the book do not make comfortable reading and although she goes along with it, it's very clear she does not enjoy it (which I actually found very unsettling). Deep down Eli is still very much a child but one who has had to do extremely unpleasant things (in more than one meaning) in order to survive for the past few hundred years, in Oskar I did feel that Lindqvist was suggesting that things might be different in the future? But lets not forget at the end of this story they are going off not just to be together but to kill innocent people in order for Eli to be able to survive, so I always felt there was a downbeat spin to the ending anyway. As I mentioned earlier I didn't like Matt Reeves use of CGI in Let Me In and I feel the film would have been better without it, what I do get though is why he did it. In the book Eli harbours a violent and uncontrollable rage when she needs to feed, after Hakan fails her with the bodged 'hanging from the tree killing' she is forced to go out and do the job herself. In immense pain (as she is basically dying) she attacks with uncontrollable aggression, Reeves used CGI to attempt to recreate Eli's hidden monster and I don't think it worked.

I never felt that Eli was cold, calculating and manipulative in any of the 3 versions of this story. I felt that she did genuinely care (or in Hakan's case perhaps had done so in the past) for whoever was close to her but she needs to survive and although she may have been on the earth for a few hundred years I always got the impression she was actually scared of a solitary existence.