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Horror remake ‘Let Me In’ maintains creepiness of the original

They're pitching "Let Me In" as a movie from the guy who made "Cloverfield," and that's more than a little immodest.

They're pitching "Let Me In" as a movie from the guy who made "Cloverfield," and that's more than a little immodest.

It's really from another guy altogether - Tomas Alfredson, who made this movie in its original version three years ago, when it was a genuinely disturbing Scandinavian horror sensation called "Let the Right One In."

"Cloverfield" director Matt Reeves gets the assignment of helming the inevitable Hollywood remake, and he refrains from improving it by having a giant monster burst through the pavement to ruin a perfectly good New York loft party. (No, I didn't much care for "Cloverfield.")

To his credit, Reeves preserves much of the original's creepy essence, rooted in the strange and ultimately hair-raising relationship between a bullied schoolboy (Kodi Smit-McPhee) and the girl next door, who's (oops) not a girl. Named Abby (Chloe Moretz), she's a creature who "needs blood to live."

When they meet, she says they shouldn't be friends, and she isn't kidding. Abby knows she's dangerous, and while she has a caretaker (Richard Jenkins) to do her dirty work, just the whiff of a single drop of human blood turns her into a frenzied, cat-eyed monster with no self-control.

Still, Abby and the boy connect, as isolated souls. She's isolated by her needs, by her power, and he by his powerlessness (and by inattentive parents overwhelmed by a divorce).

So, they grow closer. They meet on the monkey bars of their shared apartement complex each snowy evening, a touching union of loners.

He hands her a Rubik's cube, she solves it.

Can she solve all of his problems?

"Let Me In," in addition to being a horror movie, is the greatest anti-bullying public-service announcement ever made. It invites us to revel in the vigilante thrill of a ferocious creature coming to the defense of a weak-willed boy.

Yet the movie also shows subtle sympathy for the bully, whose behavior is explained in a way the boy is too young to understand.

But we do, and so we realize that as Abby is defending the boy, she's also corrupting him, drawing him into her circle of self-preservation.

Like the original, "Let Me In" is devilishly ambiguous on the subject of whether Abby means to exploit the boy. The remake is kinder to Abby, suggesting that more of her actions are guided by circumstance.

"Let Me In" also Americanizes the movie, placing it in early 1980s New Mexico, and making pointed references to a speech by Ronald Reagan in which he ascribes the country's greatness to its willingness to correct its own evils.

Is this when evil entered our cultural lives and we stopped fighting back?

The movie hides its secrets, but not its melancholy - it's right there in the downbeat '80s anti-revival bin with "Hot Tub Time Machine" and "No Country for Old Men."