Matt Reeves has made a huge name for himself, and his most recent work has been the DC property The Batman. However, this wasn’t Reeves’ first big movie, and it wasn’t even his biggest or best franchise. After his directorial debut in 1996 with The Pallbearer, he broke out huge with his 2008 found-footage horror movie Cloverfield. In 2014, Reeves took over the Planet of the Apes franchise with Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and followed it with War for the Planet of the Apes. But between Cloverfield and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Reeves directed a remake of a foreign-language horror movie that is known as a masterpiece in the genre.
On October 1, 2010, Let Me In was released in theaters in the United States. This was a risky movie because it was the remake of the brilliant Let the Right One In, and somehow, Reeves made the remake his own and somehow did the impossible by making it a hit on its own.
Let the Right One In was a 2004 Swedish vampire novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist. It told the story of a 12-year-old boy named Oskar who meets his neighbor, who is a centuries-old vampire child named Eli, in a working-class suburb of Stockholm in the early 1980s. While it is a vampire novel, its main themes are anxiety, isolation, bullying, and the struggle to fit into society around you. Four years later, Tomas Alfredson directed Let the Right One In as a Swedish-language horror film, based on a script by Lindqvist. What resulted was one of the greatest vampire movies ever made.
As Americans are apt to do, when the foreign-language movie became such a great success, Hollywood wanted to do its own version of it. This has been done too many times, and most of the time, the Americanized version drops the ball and never touches the brilliance of the original. However, this time around, it somehow worked, and much of that lies at the feet of director Matt Reeves, who was coming off his impressive found-footage horror movie Cloverfield. Reeves wrote the script, directed the movie, and made it his own.
What really helped Let Me In stand out is that Reeves made it very much an American vampire story. The worst thing that Reeves could have done was to just remake Let the Right One In and call it a day. Instead, he imagined what the story would look like in America in the 1980s and went in his own direction. The same beats were there, with the anxiety, isolation, and bullying leading the young boy and the child vampire together, but it was clearly set in a Reagan-era America, and it felt just different enough to become a success.
It also helps that Chloë Grace Moretz and Kodi Smit-McPhee fit the roles so well. By changing the title and location, Reeves was able to find success with a movie that didn’t try to just survive off the original movie’s legacy. The movie was not a giant financial success, only making $27 million worldwide on a $20 million budget, but its reviews showed that those who did see it appreciated what Reeves brought to the story. It has an 88% Rotten Tomatoes score and a 76% audience rating, and it stands up as well today as it did when it was released 16 years ago.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Matt Reeves could find success remaking a foreign-language horror masterpiece. Reeves had already proven he could do the impossible before this. When he directed Cloverfield, he took a genre that was already showing its cracks, the found-footage genre, and delivered something different from anything else that came before it. The movie was released with hardly any promotional work other than the mysterious teaser trailers, and it enjoyed a considerable amount of success.
After Let Me In, he then took on a seemingly impossible task. Rupert Wyatt relaunched the Planet of the Apes franchise with Rise of the Planet of the Apes. The movie was a success, and Reeves seemed to be placed in a tough situation when he was announced as Wyatt’s replacement for the sequel. All that Reeves did was improve on Wyatt’s first movie in every way, and it was Reeves who ensured that the trilogy still stands as one of the best in the 21st century and a highlight of the entire franchise. The Batman was a tough task, since Zack Snyder fanboys hate everything Snyder doesn’t do, but somehow Reeves won over that fandom as well. Looking back, it is no surprise he was so successful with Let Me In.
