Fantastic Fest 2010

Director Matt Reeves, Stars Kodi Smit-McPhee, Elias Koteas and Dylan Minnette, and Composer Michael Giacchino Live in Attendance!

Buy your tickets to this red carpet gala event at the Paramount Theater here!

When Tim League and I sat down to screen LET ME IN for consideration for FANTASTIC FEST 2010, I’m not gonna lie. We were very very skeptical. Possibly as much, if not more than you feel right now. LET THE RIGHT ONE IN was a huge film for FANTASTIC FEST and we all loved it. Like most film fans, when you hear that one of your favorite films of recent memory was being remade, you have a very strong, “NOOOO!!!!” stuck in your mind. When that film is a brilliant foreign film and you hear they’re doing an AMERICAN version—that’s just scary. The scary thing about LET ME IN is that even though none of us could have imagined liking the American remake as much, if not more than the original.

Matt Reeves, coming off the successful CLOVERFIELD, brings an amazing eye and ferocity to LET ME IN, but the real secret of LET ME IN is its young cast. Kodi Smit-McPhee (THE ROAD) plays Owen, the awkward little boy that Chloe Moretz’s vampiric Abby befriends. These two find each other in a small apartment complex in Los Alamos, New Mexico in the early ‘80s. In an odd way, this period and setting reminds me of films like GOONIES, EXPLORERS and more specifically E.T., only scary! The kids are as real and honest as the kids in the original, it is just… they more fully remind us of who we were at that age. When the violence kicks in, it is brutal and extreme.

I envy you seeing this for the first time, but I can’t wait to see you squirm and shriek! When you see a remake that is done with passion and skill, that culturally does add something to the conversation—and that just kicks as much ass as this—well, then you have a film to be excited by, to party about and to kick off the greatest festival of fun film going around! (Harry Knowles)

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