Familiarizing the Uncanny: Matt Reeves’s Vampire Movie Let Me In

The vampire is a peculiarly transnational phenomenon as it moves, sometimes with supernatural speed, between different countries, parts of the world, and media. One intriguing recent example is the film adaptations of John Ajvide Lindqvist’s Swedish bestselling novel Låt den rätte komma in [Let the Right One In] (2004). A Swedish film based on the novel – directed by Thomas Alfredson with the screenplay written by Lindqvist – was first screened in 2008. In 2010, Matt Reeves’s American remake of the film, Let Me In, was released. This film is set in Los Alamos in a 1980s US instead of in Swedish Blackeberg, a Stockholm suburb, in the same period. In this paper, I will relate both the cultural representation of the setting and the changes in the figure of the vampire to the uncanny, to the familiar and the unfamiliar. I am interested in to what extent the American film adaptation retains, changes, or omits uncanny elements that can be found in the Swedish adaptation and/or the novel. There are some significant changes and omissions that, I suggest, may indicate a lower tolerance of uncanny elements in the American film than in its Swedish counterpart.