Fearnet's chat with Hammer chief Simon Oakes

re LTROI:

You've got Wake Wood coming in addition to The Resident. Can you talk about the other films you have in development?

We start production this year on Let the Right One In, the re-make of the Swedish vampire movie. We saw that a couple of years ago, we thought it was amazing and we knew that it would be critically acclaimed, but get a small audience for obvious reasons, because of the fact that it's subtitled. So Matt Reeves came on board from Cloverfield. We're doing quite a faithful adaptation of it, but we're fleshing it out a little bit. We're not going to change it massively, just make it very accessible to a wider audience. That will film this year. Our slate is just beginning to settle for next year. We have The Woman in Black, which is a famous novella by Susan Hill, which is also sort of our first, if you like, traditional ghost story; which fits into the walking dead genre. Then we have a film called The Quiet Ones, which is about a group of scientists in Cambridge, a true story about scientists in Cambridge, who instead of doing what they should be doing and working on DNA, decide on creating a poltergeist. That's being written by Oren Moverman. So those are two pictures for next year, and there's probably a third that we are not sure about the timing of yet. So we intend to be very active in development, we want to be active on the net. We really need to get our act together about how we work on digital. The reason we did that little thing called Beyond the Rave, was that we felt there was an audience of sixteen- to twenty-five-year-olds who never heard of Hammer. But the social networking sites was a place to show them who and what Hammer was in the past and what it could be in the future.

That's our plan. And, basically, to be frank with you – having conversations with people like you guys so that you know what we're up to, and there can be talking and blogging. You know the horror community better than anybody in the States. I want to understand it. And I want to hear from people like you how you think we're going about our business.

The original Let the Right One In is, as you said, adored by genre fans and critics. Can you talk about what you think Matt will bring to his take on it?

I think the original is fascinating in its exposition, but at the same time there is a doggerel element to it in terms of the mood and setting. So I think it takes it out into a more accessible setting. I think perhaps there is a little more characterization in terms of the two central characters. To be perfectly frank with you, this is making an astonishing story – which however hard you might try or I might try to get people to go see the original, they're never going to do it – more accessible to a much larger audience. I think perhaps, again, the roughness of the original is great – and when I talk about faithful, I don't want to put words in Matt's mouth, because he is the creative filmmaker here, and we very much protect that with our directors – but I think it'll just have perhaps a little sheen to it that makes it a little more accessible I think. But again, I don't want to tempt faith. It's a relatively faithful adaptation. There are a number of things that we're doing which I don't want to give away, which I think open it out a little bit more, and make it a little bit more thrilling. But at the same time we're not gonna mess around by having crazy effects and stuff like that. I mean, one of my favorite scenes in the original is when she goes outside, and the camera pans back on a dolly and you see her scampering up the side of the building. That's just genius. [Laughs.] I love that.

Since Matt made the Godzilla film more accessible to many people with Cloverfield, he seems to be a good choice to adapt this material.

I think that's right. And he's one of the world's great enthusiasts, which is fantastic.