Anne Bilson is the author of Let The Right One In(Devil's Advocates). It's an essential guide to LTROI and was one of highlights of my reading list this year. Anne was kind enough to sit down for few of my questions about the book, the movie and more.....
Nightrider: Can you briefly tell us about yourself and your background?
Anne Billson: Born in Southport, brought up Exeter and Croydon. I went to art college and started out as a photographer, lived in Japan for a year. In the early 1980s magazines such as Event, Time Out and Monthly Film Bulletin started offering me work reviewing or interviewing.
For a while I combined writing and photography, but doing both simultaneously was hard work (you have to be two different personalities at the same time) so the photography eventually gave way to the writing. I still have lots of photographs I took of people I interviewed in the 1980s, and am thinking of bringing them out as a book.
In 2001 I moved to Paris, but for the past year I've been living in Brussels. I still work mostly for British publications, but I enjoy living in non-anglophone cities, exploring other cultures and trying to learn other languages.
N: What influenced your decision to write about Let The Right One In?
AB: The publishers, Auteur Books, approached me and asked if I wanted to write about LTROI for a new series they were setting up - Devil's Advocates. I didn't have much spare time, so had they suggested any other film I would probably have said no, but I jumped at the opportunity to write about LTROI, which had made a huge impression on me in a way that is all too rare nowadays. I'd found most of the horror and vampire trends of the noughties a bit depressing, and the chance to explore why this one was so exciting and different was irresistible.
N: Did you see the film before you read the novel?
AB: I saw the film first, when it came out in Paris under the title "Morse" - presumably referring to the Morse code by which Oskar and Eli communicate through the wall. Which is a crappy title (unless of course we were talking about Inspector Morse) and might explain why it's still so underappreciated in France. Which I always found odd, since French cinephiles adore "films fantastiques" and directors like Kiyoshi Kurosawa, and are generally receptive towards subtitled films, and I would have thought LTROI would have been right up their street.
N: Have you read any of John Ajvide Lindquist's other works?
AB: I've read and liked "Handling the Undead", which is an interesting and sensitive twist on stories about the walking dead. I have Little Star all fired up and ready to go on my Kindle.
N: Do you think viewer must read the novel to fully enjoy/comprehend the film?
AB: No. The film of LTROI stands on its own, but the novel (as readers will know) fills in a lot of the backstory omitted (by necessity) from the screenplay, as well as provides other subplots. So a reading of the novel will certainly enhance your enjoyment and understanding of the film, but it's not strictly necessary. It's a rare case of a film and novel complementing each other perfectly. In the event, the film is so extraordinary I can't imagine anyone who sees it not wanting to read the book as well.
N: Did you see "Let Me In" and if "YES" what did you think of it?
AB: I reviewed "Let Me In" for theartsdesk.com <http://www.theartsdesk.com/film/let-me> By remake standards, it's not bad, if a much more conventional horror movie than LTROI; I found the music too emphatic and a lot of the dialogue too "on the nose". (For example, the Richard Jenkins character spelling it all out for us with "Maybe I want to get caught. Maybe I'm just tired of all this." I think Jenkins is a good enough actor to have conveyed these feelings without us needing to be told.)
In fact, I wish Matt Reeves, the writer and director, had gone back to the novel and offered his own interpretation of it, instead of rehashing the Swedish film so closely. For me, the best parts were the ones where he took off and did his own thing - the scenes of Jenkins stalking and attacking the boy in the car, for example.
N: I've seen Let The Right One In being referred to as "queer" friendly cinema.
In your opinion is there any validity to that label?
AB: It could be "queer" friendly cinema in that it reminds you that the standard heterosexual relationship, as presented in most films and certainly nearly all Hollywood productions, is a very narrow-minded, restrictive and ultimately dishonest concept. But the great thing about the relationship between Eli and Oskar is that it's so ambiguous, not just in the area of gender, but in the way it obliquely touches on subjects such as mutual dependency and emotional exploitation. It reminds you that even the purest love is more complicated than it may appear.
The best horror films don't present you with a neat predetermined package, but offer a multiplicity of metaphors, allowing the viewer to pick and choose interpretations that might be relevant to their own wishes and thoughts, and of which even the film-makers themselves might not have been aware. To put it in the simplest terms, optimists or romantics will view the film very differently from pessimists or cynics, just as gays probably view it very differently from heterosexuals, or female viewers will see it differently from male ones. We each of us bring something different to the party.
N: Johan Söderqvist's sublime soundtrack is one of the few times that I remember when a film score becomes an essential part of the narrative and affects viewer with just a few notes. Could you touch upon importance of music in LTROI.
AB: The LTROI soundtrack is the soundtrack of a love story, not of a standard horror film - it's wistful and romantic, offering a counterpoint to the story rather than hammering home its emotional notes (which is what the soundtrack does in the remake). It connects Oskar and Eli at a subliminal level, and helps us understand that although Eli does monstrous things, she is not a monster.
Mainstream horror film-makers tend to use music as a crude tool to make the audience jump, or to dictate mood rather than suggesting it. In LTROI we don't need to be informed that what's going on is scary and sometimes sick - we can see that for ourselves. But the music hints at the internal lives of the characters - their yearning, their hopelessness and isolation.
N: Do you think LTROI influenced fantasy/horror genre even though it's theatrical and video release did not make a bigger splash?
AB: I've don't think I've seen evidence of any concrete influence - though LTROI certainly points to an alternative approach to the horror genre, which in itself is a relief after the avalanche of bland horror remakes with no subtext, or home invasion movies or "torture porn" scenarios that are gruelling without being very interesting. I grew up watching horror movies in the 1970s, so I've already been there and seen all that (and in ways that were better, scarier and contained more interesting ideas) in the early films of Cronenberg, Craven, Carpenter, Cohen and co.
LTROI represents to me all the elements that horror films are CAPABLE of embracing, in the right hands - beauty, truth, terror, and (this sounds a bit pretentious, but I think it's true) reflections on death and sex, the nature of humanity and how we treat one another in the real world. I'm still hoping there are young would-be film-makers or screenwriters out there who are maybe now looking on LTROI as their model, rather than, say, Hostel or Rob Zombie's remake of Halloween.
N: Could you talk a bit about vampire film genre and where do you see LTROI on the importance scale within that genre.
AB: When I was small, Dracula was an unequivocally evil (albeit sometimes erotic) figure, and vampires were not considered a fit subject for children. The popularity of Anne Rice's novels and the TV series "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" (and probably also, for Americans, the TV show "Dark Shadows" which never made it across the Atlantic) changed attitudes to vampires, who were gradually transformed into heroic or tragic figures. Now, post-"Twilight", they're viewed as perfect boyfriend material! I was amused by a reader's review of my own vampire novel, Suckers, which complained that I didn't bring out "the magifence [sic] of the vampyres, rather she made them look shallow and stupid" - it seems that many people now look on vampires as role models rather than as soulless creatures to be pitied or feared.
LTROI, on the other hand, shows Eli's appetites as monstrous, even though it allows us to empathise with her, and suggests that living for centuries might not be the non-stop party you might expect. I think it's important that the film doesn't glamorize the vampire but places her/him not in the Gothic world of Universal or Hammer, but in the sort of social realist setting already glimpsed in George Romero's "Martin" and Kathryn Bigelow's "Near Dark".
If you really were a vampire, even if you lived for centuries you probably wouldn't get the leisure time to dress in skin-tight leather and do cool martial arts, or learn to play the cello, or date boring teenage girls. If you really were a vampire, your entire life would revolve around the acquisition of the blood you needed to stay alive.
You would, in effect, be a serial killer, and even with super-strength and longevity on your side, you would inevitably spend most of your time trying to find your food and then disposing of the corpses, keeping one step ahead of the authorities, making sure you left no official trace of your existence while either earning or stealing enough money to enable you to function in the modern world, dealing with paperwork (have you ever tried renting a flat without the right documents?) and you would, like Eli, feel terribly lonely, not just because you're one of a kind and have lived for centuries, but because all those practical concerns don't leave you with much time to enjoy a social life. I can't see how having to drink other people's blood to stay alive could on any level be construed as a desirable condition.
N: Is the relationship between Eli and Oscar completely devoid of sexuality or there's a possibility that we as viewers do not get the full picture since Eli is a much older creature?
AB: I wonder if any relationship could be entirely devoid of sexuality, since that's such an integral part of who and what we are - even a lack of sexuality is in itself sexual.
In "Twilight", I always think of 100-year-old Edward Cullen romancing a 17-year-old girl as the vampire equivalent of a paedophile posing as a teenager on an internet chatroom. The case of Eli is different, since she (I'm referring to her as "she" for convenience's sake, though we all know it's more complicated than that) really does seem to have been frozen in the body and mind of a 12-year-old. When she says, "I've been 12 for a very long time," it's the truth, she's not just pretending to be 12. I think she wants a playmate and companion rather than a boyfriend or lover - and the scene of Eli and Oskar in bed together is extraordinary in its innocence.
But of course, one of the great things about LTROI is its ambiguity, so someone else might see their relationship very differently, as either more hopeful and romantic, or more sinister and doom-laden.
N:Without bringing up Lindquist's semi-sequel Let The Old Dreams Die and judging strictly from what is seen in the film, what do you think is the ultimate outcome of Oscar and Eli's relationship?
AB: Speaking as a cynic - unless Eli "turns" Oskar (which as we've seen is a tortuous and painful process, and would simply leave them with two vampires to feed instead of just one) I fear it would go the way of all relationships: a honeymoon period to begin with, followed by mutual dependency, with Eli perhaps becoming less attractive to Oskar as he ages, and Oskar becoming increasingly uncomfortable about any physical attraction he might develop towards Eli, with the two of them doomed to repeat the "marriage" Eli had with Håkan.
Even if the romantic in me (and of course all cynics are hopeless romantics at heart) hopes it might be otherwise, it doesn't even begin to address the practical considerations of their situation - how on earth are two 12-year-old kids going to manage on their own without social services getting nosy? Not to mention the police hunt (for there will surely be one) for Oskar.
So the film leaves us with the perfect happy ending. Once you start thinking beyond that, things get darker. But then isn't that what happens with the endings of, for example, rom-coms? We're left with the couple suspended at the height of their happiness, and we're not supposed to think too deeply about all the arguments, infidelity, domestic violence, divorce, custody battles, sickness and death that lie ahead of them.
N: Could you address Tomas Alfredson's direction in LTROI.
AB: "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy", Alfredson's second film, only confirmed for me that he's a director who never moves his camera without narrative or emotional purpose. His style is deliberate and measured; he's not trying to impress you with modish effects or the latest camera tricks, or showing-off his technical prowess, or flinging his camera around because that's what all the hip directors are doing right now.
Everything is at the service of drawing you into the story. Alfredson is not interested in giving you a shock-filled fun-ride or spelling everything out, he credits his audience with enough intelligence and patience to read between the lines; viewers who try to watch LTROI without giving it their full attention are liable to miss a lot, or even find it boring. I fear audiences are increasingly finding it hard to concentrate on stories that are anything other than predictable and bland - I don't see how you can watch a film like LTROI while texting or telephoning or talking.
At the same time, Alfredson's directing is so classically simple it's beautiful, and so timeless I can't imagine it ever looking dated.
N: With so many redundant re-makes coming out of Hollywood do you think it's still possible to create an original work of cinema
within a studio system?...or is it up to independents at this point?
AB: Having read about the changes made to the screenplay of the prequel of "The Thing", I'm inclined to think it's now almost impossible to sneak anything original or subversive or even excessively intelligent into films made within the Hollywood studio system, which produces its screenplays by committee and relies on test-screenings to smooth out all the narrative wrinkles that we would probably have found intriguing.
Which is fair enough - the budgets are so big and productions so unwieldly one can understand why studios might not be willing to turn out a film that hasn't already been dumbed down to cater almost exclusively to what they imagine is the all-important adolescent male demographic, which likes gore (but not too much of it), female roles which are purely decorative, a clear-cut moral agenda, and which doesn't enjoy having to think too deeply or having its preconceptions challenged or disturbed in any way.
Independent film-makers have more creative freedom, but obviously less of a budget to play with - which theoretically ought to be a good thing, since they can't cover up their lack of story or characters with pyrotechnic special effects and explosions. The classic set-up for a low-budget screenplay is basically a bunch of characters in a room - which sounds restrictive, but in fact provides more creative choice than you might think. For example, "Sex, Lies and Videotape", "Reservoir Dogs" and the "Paranormal Activity" films are all very different variations on this formula. The simplicity of it obliges film-makers to exercise their imaginations and work on the meat and potatoes - the plots and characters.
I'd like to see more low-budget horror film-makers taking this route, though at the moment they seem fixated on making endless films about zombies. I also suspect a lot of low-budget horror movies are made by people with no particular love or interest in the genre (or more of them would surely be developing it in new and intriguing ways) but who are just dabbling in it because they see it as cheap and easy.
N: What are you currently working on?
AB: I'm currently polishing a horror novel called "The Coming Thing", about an aspiring actress who find she's pregnant with the Antichrist. With hilarious results. After that, I shall be finishing "Vampire City", the sequel to "Suckers", which is set (like "A Tale of Two Cities") in Paris and London. Then I've already drawn up plans for a Young Adult tetralogy about Parisian vampires, though I'm such a slow writer that by the time I finish everyone will be fed up to the back teeth with vampires.
On the other hand, perhaps by that time the current fad for vampires will have run its course, and be so passé that the subject will have gone full-circle and discerning readers will be willing to read about them once again. Vampires move with the times, so we'll always be looking for vampire stories that serve up new twists on the old myths, or new metaphors to tie them into our own lives.
Nightrider: I would like to thank Anne Billson on behalf of WTI for speaking with me. It was fun.
Anne's work can be found at: http://www.amazon.com/AnneBillson/e/B00 ... _pel_pop_1
and: https://www.smashwords.com/dashboard
