Mark and his daughter Ellie move back to New York City ten years after she was turned into a vampire, and they’re looking for a cure.

For anyone familiar with either the original novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist, or Tomas Alfredson’s brilliant 2008 film, the spoiler-free premise of this new Paramount+ series cited above may well have existing fans of Let the Right One In banging their heads against the wall in dismay.

I need to declare an interest. I love the book. I’ve read it several times. I think the Swedish movie version is one of the all-time great vampire films (the American English language remake, not so much, but it’s a decent enough watch). I’ve seen both films on multiple occasions. A few years ago, I directed Jack Thorne’s stage adaptation, and I can say with good authority that his script makes for one hell of a night in a theatre. I can’t wait to see the upcoming production at Manchester’s Royal Exchange.

I’m not a big fan of traditional vampire dramas. I can’t be doing with all that gothic nonsense – but variations on the genre, like the recent rip-roaring Australian reinvention, Firebite, are right up my artery, and I admire Let the Right One In even more. Having said this, as someone who has adapted dozens of books in my time, I hope I am never precious about a source, no matter how treasured. It should always be acceptable for writers to reconceive and reimagine classic material, but… but…

…with the best will in the world, I have a major problem with this new iteration. Without spoiling the original for anyone who hasn’t seen it, the premise for this TV series is a bit like saying, ‘What if Bruce Willis wasn’t the sort of person Haley Joel Osment could see?’ or ‘What if Charlton Heston just landed on some random planet where the monkeys were in charge?’ or ‘What if Soylent Green was made out of tofu?’. Indeed, the premise here is the exact thing that you think the original LTROI is about when you start watching it, but then discover, stunningly, that it isn’t. In making this change, Andrew Hinderaker has taken the narrative keystone, the turn that makes the story so compelling – and dark and troublesome – and binned it. Apart from superficial similarities this is a significantly different, and oddly emasculated story.

So, now I’ve stopped banging my head against the wall, in an attempt to be fair, does this new version work in its own right? Well… sort of. It’s perfectly fine, but because, now, Ellie is unambiguously the daughter of Isiah’s new neighbour, we’re in the world of a father-daughter family dynamic which becomes incongruously sentimental at times, despite the added fangs.

Verdict: This Let the Right One In is a challenge for pre-existing fans, and its new story lacks the edge of the original, but it’s a decent if slightly anodyne watch, which may improve if it stakes out its own narrative territory and moves even further from its source material. 5/10

Martin Jameson