Forget this shit, watch the ORIGINAL instead

I have to argue that the American remake is a far superior horror film, based on the addition of one small, yet crucial detail.

In the American adaption, we see Owen, the young protagonist, find an old photo of Abby the vampire and his/her protector from decades ago when the protector was a young boy the same age as Owen is now. Though he chooses to ignore it, this is is an omen of what will eventually happen to Owen; he will slowly become a duplicate of Abby's adult protector, a pathetic elderly, child-obsessed man, aged into a pedo and murdering innocent people to appease his child-like vampire mistress.

This is entirely missing in the original Swedish film and novel. As explained in the novel, Hakan is just some pedo former teacher that Eli recently convinced to help him/her. In the end, Oskar and he/she will go off and have a happy life of fun vampire adventures together.

Without this old photo the story is just the author's personal childhood fantasy of having a cute vampire companion to protect him from bullies. In all likelihood, he based it on "The Little Vampire", a 1979 German children's book that had some international popularity in the early 80s when he was a kid. It's nothing but a feel-good revenge wish-fulfillment fantasy story. I hear the author was so upset that his novel about his childhood fantasy was interpreted as Oskar becoming a slave by some readers, that he wrote a short story just to state that his characters have this fairy tale happily ever after ending. It's essentially Twilight with preteens.

With the finding of the old photo in the American remake, the narrative becomes a genuinely chilling horror story about how a lonely, misfit young boy is groomed and seduced into becoming a replacement monstrous slave to an ageless, evil being, and how his day-to-day world is so empty and unwelcoming that he finds the idea attractive. It's bloodcurdling in its unspoken implication due to that photograph, and that aspect is completely missing from the Swedish film and the original novel.

Besides that point, the Swedish culture on display in LTROI is no great revelation. It's actually little different from a more subdued version of North American culture, as US culture has had a huge influence in most countries around the world. It felt quite similar to Canada in many ways to me, with all the layabouts on Government pensions living in their little rent-to-income apartments, slacking off at the bar every day with no societal pressure to look after themselves.

The USA has a large audience for arthouse / foreign language cinema. It's not large in percentage terms measured against the population of the country, but it's a very big population, so in raw numbers the arthouse crowd is not unimpressive. It's a very important market on the international film circuit.

But Let Me In (and other remakes of non-American films) is aimed squarely at the mainstream American market. Those audiences mostly wouldn't watch a subtitled film if you pointed guns at their heads. As such, its existence doesn't really take anything away from the original because that audience was never under any circumstances going to see the original. The two films are effectively aimed at two entirely separate crowds.

To the arthouse crowd, Let Me In is utterly redundant. To the mainstream crowd, well, a lot of them probably aren't even aware of the existence of Let the Right One In.

On the other hand, you might get a few stray people who enjoy Let Me In, become aware that it's a remake, and decide to take the plunge and check out the original. And that's going to be a bonus, isn't it?

All in all, while I too wish more Americans would open themselves up to non-American films, yelling at them about it isn't going to make it happen.

In many cases, the original foreign version is superior, but not in this case. The original is good, this remake is great.