Cultural Adaptation in Matt Reeves's Vampire

American Studies in Scandinavia, 48:1 (2015), pp. 25-41. Published by the Nordic Association for American Studies (NAAS). Dealing with the Uncanny? Cultural Adaptation in Matt Reeves’s Vampire Movie Let Me In Maria Holmgren Troy Karlstad University Abstract: The aim of this article is to examine cultural adaptation and uncanny potential in Matt Reeves’s vampire movie Let Me In (2010), which is an adaptation of John Ajvide Lindqvist’s vampire novel Låt den rätte komma in (2004) – in English translation, Let the Right One In (2007) – and the Swedish film adaptation (2008), for which Lindqvist wrote the screenplay. The article draws on Linda Hutcheon’s theo- retical account of “transculturating” and “transcultural adaptations” as well as on different discussions of the uncanny. My analysis establishes that both films evoke the uncanny by introducing horror into the familiar and ordinary as represented by the geographical setting; however, it also shows that there are significant ideological differences between the American film and the Swedish film and novel concerning gender and sexuality, particularly related to the two central figures of the boy and the vampire, but also in relationships that can be regarded as part of the general social and cultural setting. In short, gender-bending and sexual ambiguities, in addition to the uncanny aspects of the human protagonist, are omitted in the American version. In these respects, Reeves’s adaptation is less complex, less uncanny, and much more ideologically conservative than the Swedish versions. Keywords: Matt Reeves – Let Me In – John Ajvide Lindqvist – Let the Right One In – cultural adaptation – the uncanny – horror film – vampire fiction That tells you something about the modernity of the place, its rationality. It tells you something of how free they were from the ghosts of history and of terror. It explains in part how unprepared they were. – John Ajvide Lindqvist, Let the Right One In 26 American Studies in Scandinavia, 48:1 The figure of the vampire is a peculiarly transnational phenomenon as it moves, sometimes with supernatural speed, between different countries, parts of the world, and media. It is however mediated differently in different cultural contexts. One intriguing recent example is the Swedish and Ameri- can film adaptations of John Ajvide Lindqvist’s bestselling Swedish novel Låt den rätte komma in (2004). This novel features a bullied twelve-year- old boy, who lives with his divorced mother in an apartment complex and whose life changes when he befriends a vampire child who, together with an adult human helper, moves in next door. The Swedish film adaptation of the novel, with the screenplay written by Lindqvist, was directed by Tomas Alfredson and first screened in 2008; it reached an international as well as national audience to great acclaim.1 The year before, Lindqvist’s novel had already appeared in English translation as Let the Right One In (2007). In 2010, Matt Reeves’s American film adaptation, or remake, was released un- der the title Let Me In. In commonsensical terms, it is not easy to determine whether the American film, for which Reeves wrote the screenplay, should be regarded as an adaptation of the novel or a remake of the Swedish film.2 There are scenes in the American film that are direct “quotations” from the Swedish film, and Reeves mentions the Swedish screenplay as well as the novel in the credits of Let Me In. However, Reeves and Lindqvist seem to agree that Let Me In is an adaptation (Reeves; Karlsson). My aim here is not to settle the question whether the American film is an adaptation or a remake once and for all, nor is it necessary to do so. As Linda Hutcheon points out, “Remakes are invariably adaptations because of changes in context” (170), and it is the cultural adaptation in Reeve’s film of aspects of the novel and the Swedish film that is the focus of this article. In my analysis of Let Me In, which to date has attracted sparse critical commentary (Gelder 38-41; Siegel), I will draw on Hutcheon’s discussion on “transculturating” and “transcultural adaptations” in A Theory of Adap- tation (2006). Hutcheon observes, “[a]n adaptation, like the work it adapts, is always framed in a context – a time and a place, a society and a culture” (142). She also suggests that, “[a]lmost always, there is an accompanying shift in the political valence from the adapted text to the ‘transculturated’ 1 The Swedish film has won 55 film awards, five of which are Swedish (“Guldbagge”). For most of these awards the film itself or director Tomas Alfredson was the recipient. 2 For a discussion of recent Hollywood remakes in the horror genre, see Steffen Hantke’s introduction to American Horror Film (2010), vii-xii. DEALING WITH THE UNCANNY? 27 adaptation” (Hutcheon 145). The time of the two film adaptations is similar both in terms of context (2008, 2010) and setting (early 1980s), but the place differs: Reeves’s American Hollywood film is set in Los Alamos in the USA instead of in Swedish Blackeberg, a Stockholm suburb, which is the setting of both the Swedish film and the novel. Both films are catego- rized as horror films and include a number of scenes of graphic horror, such as a woman spectacularly burning to death in a hospital bed and body parts, newly ripped apart, sinking down in a swimming pool. However, what will concern me here, in the comparison of certain other aspects of the American adaptation with their equivalents in the Swedish adaptation and/or the novel, is the subtler uncanny potential of these aspects,3 which, at least partly, are connected to ideological issues. In this article, then, I will argue that there are significant ideological differences – shifts in the “political valence” – between the American film and the Swedish film and novel. These differences concern gender and sexuality, particularly related to the two central figures of the boy and the vampire, but also in relationships that can be regarded as part of the general social and cultural setting. These differences, I will suggest, have an impact on the (potentially) uncanny effects of these two horror films. To my knowledge, there is no criticism dealing with the transcultural adaptation of uncanny elements in these films, nor in any other horror films.4 As Barbara Creed has argued, though, “[t]he cinema, particularly the horror film, offers a particularly rich medium for an analysis of contemporary representations of the uncanny” (6), which further motivates an investi- gation into these aspects of Reeves’s film using a transcultural adaptation approach. The uncanny is a slippery concept; it has to do with uncertainty and the unsettling of boundaries – between the familiar and the unfamiliar, between the animate and the inanimate, between stable gender and sexual categories, and so on. Indeed, the vampire is often an uncanny figure, unsettling the boundary not only between life and death but also between human and nonhuman. The uncanny is generally regarded as an effect of the 3 To be uncanny, S. S. Prawer points out in Caligari’s Children: The Film as Tale of Terror (1980), “a work need not provide shocks of horror” (111). More recently, Barbara Creed has observed that Freud’s “forms of the uncanny describe the metamorphosis of the familiar into the unfamiliar, of bringing to light what should have remained hidden, of the dissolution of boundaries between the real and imagined – and all are mainstays of the horror film” (7). 4 For five articles on horror cinema and transcultural adaptation, see Richard J. Hand and Jay McRoy’s Monstrous Adaptations (2007). 28 American Studies in Scandinavia, 48:1 secularization and rationality of the Enlightenment and modernity; it is the return of repressed irrational and supernatural residue, often in gothic form (Castle; Royle 8). For further clarifications of the uncanny in my discussion below, I will draw on Freud’s seminal essay “The ‘Uncanny’ (1919)” and on central works on the uncanny by Terry Castle and Nicholas Royle. The geographical setting is essential to the uncanny atmosphere and horror of the novel and the two films. In Freud’s definition “the uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar” (Freud 220), and “it has to do with the sense that things are not as they have come to appear through habit and familiarity, that they may challenge all rationality and logic” (Bennett and Royle 37). In Lindqvist’s novel, the rational and well-organized place appears to be a precondition for the free play of horror (Wijkmark 9), which the epigraph to this article indicates. Examining the Swedish film, Rochelle Wright remarks, “The setting is recognizably Blackeberg in the 1980s, to a Swedish audience both familiar and mundane” (58). In Let Me In, as well as in the Swedish novel and film, the horror hinges on the ordinariness and familiarity of the sur- roundings. It is in capturing this uncanny familiarity we can see the mo- tivation for setting the story in American Los Alamos instead of Swedish Blackeberg in the American film; more generally, as Hutcheon puts it, “[i]n the name of relevance, adapters seek the ‘right’ resetting or recontextualiz- ing” in their transcultural adaptation work (Hutcheon 146). In the American movie, everyday ordinariness is also emphasized in the centrality of cars, which here serve as the hunting ground for the vampire’s human helper, whereas the Swedish counterpart uses public transport and finds his victims on foot in a forest area and in the locker room of a public swimming pool.

Load more