In this strange complex of time and space anything can happen

This is the American / British Hammer Productions remake of the Swedish film Let The Right One In (2008), which I watched last night on the Horror Channel. I've seen the Swedish version twice: once while travelling in Australia in 2017 (LJ / DW) and once at the Hyde Park Picture House in 2019 (LJ / DW). My previous experience of such remakes had led me to assume it would be crass and unsubtle, but for once that isn't a fair accusation at all. According to the film's Wikipedia entry, the producers aimed to stay true to the original novel and film, while making it accessible to a wider audience. I'd say they very much succeeded - though it's a pity for many reasons that the additional people this version will have reached won't normally contemplate stepping beyond their cultural bubble and watching a 'foreign' film.

The setting is transposed to New Mexico, which I did not know gets such a lot of snowy weather, but apparently it does, allowing the snowy setting of the Swedish original to be retained. The names are of course changed, so that Eli (the vampire) becomes Abby, her 12-year-old friend Oskar becomes Owen, and her previous servant Håkan becomes Thomas. Some of the special effects are slightly shonkier, like Abby's eyes when she is in full vampire mode, which definitely lack the subtlety of the original. But the general emotive power of the original is well matched, and so is the quality of cinematography and editing. Largely speaking, the story, the scenes used to convey it and the dialogue are unchanged except for being culturally Americanised: e.g. through more emphasis on religious belief in good and evil, more use of cars including a high-speed accident, and a more jockish feel to the high school bullies.

That said, there are various minor differences of detail - or at least I think these are differences, though I may be mistaken due to an imperfect memory of the original. We start with the capture, hospitalisation and suicide of Abby's previous servant, Thomas, from the point of view of the police and hospital staff, and then go back in time a couple of weeks to the two of them arriving at the apartment complex, before working our way back later on to the same events from his and Abby's perspectives. There's also more emphasis than I remember on the police officer as a character, I supposed again fitting American cultural expectations arising from the ubiquity of cop shows and movies. By contrast, Owen's father is largely removed from the narrative - Owen doesn't go and stay with him, and he appears only as an inadequately-supportive voice on the end of a phone-line. The cat-lady who gets bitten by Eli in the Swedish version and survives but begins turning into a vampire here has one dog instead of many cats, isn't as fully developed as a character, and bursts into flames because a nurse innocently opens the hospital blinds in her room, rather than because she has realised what's happening and asks for the blinds to be opened as a way of stopping it.

The questions which the Swedish version raised around gender were also pushed a little further here. Eli's statement about not being a girl is repeated verbatim by Abby, though Abby follows it up a bit further when Owen pushes her (them?) on it by saying she is 'no-one'. Meanwhile, on Owen's side, one of the main ways in which his bullies torment him is by calling him 'little girl' and referring to him using female pronouns. I'm 90% sure this isn't matched for the Oskar character in the Swedish version, so it becomes another thing they have in common in the remake: that both occupy a space outside of gender norms, whether willingly or unwillingly.

This version also seemed to make it more explicit to the viewer that Owen will become Abby's next servant, ending up like Thomas. This isn't to say that wasn't a suggested by the Swedish version - I noted exactly that in my first review of it (LJ / DW). I may also have been more alert to the pointers in this version, having already seen the other twice. But I felt there were two specific cues pointing fairly explicitly towards the parallel, and although the first may have been in the Swedish version too, I'm close to certain the second wasn't. One was a scene of Abby knocking on Thomas' hospital window and asking to be let in so she can kill him, followed immediately by another of her knocking on Owen's window and asking to be let in so she can snuggle up with him - i.e. the editing established a strong parallel between the two characters. The second was Owen finding passport photo booth pictures of Abby with Thomas when he was much younger in their apartment, looking just as nerdy as Owen and confirming for us the path that Thomas has been on. For me, this greater clarity made the developing relationship between Abby and Owen look rather less charming and a lot more like her grooming him, although again that may also be because I'm pretty familiar with the overall story by now.

Overall, definitely worth watching if you enjoyed the Swedish version, although the clearer delineation of Owen's future fate made the ending a little less bittersweet and more simply icky.

I went to see this with big_daz on Wednesday night at the Everyman, Leeds. It's the second new release I've seen in the cinema this year, which is already more than I manage some years in total. If there were more films like this to go and see, that would be very different.

It is framed in multiple ways as a fairy tale. One is the two bookended voice-over sequences which begin by describing the main character, Elisa, as a princess and end by talking about her happy ending. They turn out to be voiced by her neighbour, who has spent his life painting advertising posters but is quickly being made obsolete by the camera, who keeps his television permanently tuned to old black-and-white musicals and comedies, and who ponders whether he was born too early or too late. That is, we are being told a story by a man disconnected from reality whose job is to sell fantasies. Elisa herself we first meet fast asleep on her couch, sunk deep into a watery dream-world, while throughout the film sound and light from the cinema over which she lives leak up into her apartment, and at one point she herself breaks out into a black-and-white song-and-dance routine to voice the love for the creature which she cannot speak. Perhaps some time in the decade before 1962 (the film's dramatic date) she has sat downstairs watching Creature from the Black Lagoon, absorbed its soundtrack in her sleep, and been living it in her dreams ever since? Later on, she returns the favour, sending the watery by-products of her own fantasy romance dripping onto customers nodding off in the auditorium below when she floods her bathroom to turn it into an aquatic playground. In fact, between her voicelessness and the fact that she was both found by water as a baby and ultimately finds her happiness there, she may as well be the Little Mermaid, on land only ever temporarily while she finds her prince.

All these markers of fairy-tale status are of course crucial cues in allowing us to accept the extraordinary story of a romance between an ordinary woman and a humanoid amphibian with magical powers. But they also allow us to enjoy another kind of fantasy alongside it: that of a bunch of underprivileged outsiders successfully sticking it to The Man. Elisa is mute. Giles, her ageing advertising-designer neighbour, is gay. Zelda, her best friend at the facility where they work, is black. And infiltrated into the facility's team of scientists is 'Bob', aka Dimitri, a Russian spy who has come to feel as strongly about science as he does about the motherland. Meanwhile, The Man himself manifests as Colonel Strickland, the facility's authoritarian, racist, misogynistic boss, who tortures the creature as much for fun as to learn anything from it and who takes the decision to vivisect it rather than trying to study it alive without it even occurring to him that this might be something to pause over, let alone actually doing so. In all this, he's the successor of Dr Mark Williams from the original film (LJ / DW), but much more starkly militaristic and exaggeratedly nasty. And boy, is it satisfying to see him out-foxed by our plucky band of misfits, pulling off the creature's liberation from the facility while he can't begin to imagine that they could even be capable of any such thing.

This might all sound rather heavy-handed, except that each character is drawn with such humanity it's impossible not to believe in them. In fact the entire story is approached with the same utter seriousness which makes Hammer's dark fairy-tales just as compelling. No-one here has their tongue in their cheek, or behaves like an avatar standing in for a particular social group. Instead, each has their own inner turmoil and believable home-life (Zelda's lazy husband, Dimitri's careful ironing), including Strickland, whose career trajectory still doesn't quite satisfy his perfect all-American wife. On both sides of the balance, it's important that these characters aren't clichés and don't jump straight into their assigned roles. Elisa's friends need a lot of persuasion before they'll help her rescue the creature, while we see the system that creates Strickland in the even less sympathetic General Hoyt above him, and in how easy it is for a smarmy car salesman to talk him into buying an expensive Cadillac in a colour he doesn't like.

The film is also dripping with deeply symbolic detail, which likewise might have seemed over-done if it weren't for the fairy-tale framing and the believability of the characters. Most obvious is the colour-palette, all muted, swampy greens and blues in scaly patterns to suit the aquatic theme, but also to set off occasional departures the more starkly - like the red dress and shoes which Elisa is suddenly wearing the day after she and the creature have found out how to express their affection physically. Perhaps next most obviously, the oppressive machinery of capitalism. Vents and pipes above the creature's tank resemble not only the original Gill-Man but also (to me at least) the Machine-Mammon from Metropolis (1927). Elisa, Zelda and their co-workers are slaves to the facility's clocking-in system and CCTV cameras. And when the creature staggers into the cinema below Elisa's apartment, he finds it showing scenes of slaves working in the mines from The Story of Ruth (1960).


The cinema complex itself is called the Orpheum, perfectly underpinning Elisa's use of music (and boiled eggs) to win the confidence of the creature - though she plays it jazz on a portable record player rather than singing to the lyre. The facility is called the Occam institute, which drove me to Wikipedia - I know the basic principle and couldn't see how it might apply to this story, but found my answer in the biology section, where it turns out that it has featured quite heavily in debates around evolution and the matter of whether or not any animals share human-style psychology. There we are very much amongst the concerns of del Toro's story. Finally, in case it wasn't clear enough how rotten Strickland is, he spends most of the film with two of his fingers, severed by the creature after one too many electric shocks and reattached by surgeons, blackening and reeking as the attachment fails and they die on his hand. Towards the end, in one of several body-horror moments which had me squirming in my seat and putting my own fingers over my eyes, he acts out just how literally he has gone to pieces by pulling them off and throwing them at the terrified Zelda. I'm sure there is much more besides.

Nothing quite stops the niggling world-building questions bubbling up. Like, if the creature is 'from the Amazon', why does it seem to need saline water and return quite happily to the ocean at the end? And how exactly would its ability to switch between lung- and gill-based breathing systems be any particular help in the Space Race, as both the Americans and Russians seems to think? But ultimately none of these matter next to Elisa's coy, satisfied smile and the electric blue lights flickering across the creature's body. For that, everyone involved deserves my profoundest thanks, and I only hope the cinema industry as a whole is watching and learning.

I get the impression it is more of a north American than an English thing. Our trans-Atlantic cousins' equivalent to mulled wine, I suppose. In fact, the only time I can recall actually drinking any was at a Christmas party hosted by the lovely redkitty23, who is indeed American. It seemed OK, but I haven't felt inspired to track any down since.

In the course of a quick Google to remind myself of what is in it, though, I stumbled across something called the Eggnog Riot, which was apparently sparked off in 1826 after some hot-blooded young cadets smuggled whiskey for making eggnog into an American Military Academy. I do feel that knowledge like that ought to be shared.

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So this one is from the same hand as The Myth Makers (Donald Cotton) - and to me, that means: Do. Not. Underestimate. On one level, Cotton does here what I thought he was going to do in The Myth Makers (and which was really pioneered by Dennis Spooner in The Romans, anyway) - that is, he gives us a story which draws broadly on the Wild West films and TV series that the audience will have been familiar with, serving up a sort of pastiche while showing scant regard for the real history of the era. But I don't think what's going on here is quite as simple as a case of just ignoring the real history of this era (this time known, of course, with a security that was never possible for The Myth Makers) and having a laugh. To me, this story also demonstrates much the same kind of knowing commentary on what he is doing that Cotton presented in The Myth Makers.

( A fancy dress party gone horribly wrong )

( Lyrical narrative )

( Comments on the Doctor Who format )

( The Doctor's double (again) )

( The Doctor out of his depth? )

( The Doctor's new ethical stance )

( Audience reaction )

Heh - it's been a busy weekend, during which I've done virtually nothing but watch and write about Doctor Who. But that's pretty much my ideal weekend anyway. As a result I have at least got myself into a situation where there are only two of the early, 'pure' historicals left for me to watch - so it is perfectly possible for me to do that (though probably not also to review them here) before leaving for the CA on Wednesday morning. OK, so there are also four other stories in between them which I really ought to watch for total familiarity with this era. But I think I can hold my own now.

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Apparently, the UK consulate in New York has been bombed. (Thanks to rentaghost31 for the tip-off). Nothing too serious, but erk!

It's fairly obviously election-related, but I suppose in a way we can be paradoxically reassured. It suggests that whoever is behind it (presumably al-Qaeda or similar) doesn't have operatives capable of doing the same in the UK itself, and, at least on this occasion, wasn't able to mount a particularly effective attack.

I mean, these are still only small comforts, but you know... I'm just sorry that the attackers obviously do have operatives in the US.