Just last Friday we showed you the first shot of Chloe Moretz as the lead character of “Abby” in Let Me In, the upcoming Matt Reeves-directed adaptation of Let the Right One In. Now we’ve got a shot of her meeting poor little disturbed “Owen” (Kodi Smit-McPhee from The Road). It’s a pretty important scene in both the book and the film, as it’s the moment that these two unique individuals really start to have a relationship.

Not quite sure why she’s wearing a hoodie, though.

We also got this shot of Matt Reeves behind the scenes. Exciting!

Reeves recently talked with the LA Times about the response to him directing the film… he knows we’re all concerned. “I think because of ‘Cloverfield,’ people have an assumption, which is, ‘Oh, crazy handicam, he’s going to jazz it up,’ ” Reeves said. “And I think that’s probably what a lot of people were afraid of when they thought of the most cynical version. And that’s the last thing we tried to do. We tried to create the approaching, foreboding dread of movies like ‘The Shining,’ where you feel like something wicked is unraveling and it’s not going to end well. That’s what I responded to about the original, the juxtaposition of those tones, this very disturbing story but at the center of it there are these very tender emotions. That’s a very unusual mix, and that’s what drew me in and dug into me.”

He also, however, might reignite your fears with the word that there are some 300 effects shots in the film.

“In the same sense I want the photography to have this kind of messy realism, to be beautiful but gritty,” said Reeves, “I want the effects to feel believable. I want people to think back later and say, ‘I don’t even know if that’s an effect.’ I don’t want anything that pulls you out. It’s not going to feel like a movie with a crazy number of effects. It’s, hopefully, going to feel like an intimate coming-of-age story.”

Book update! I finally finished Let the Right One In and really loved it. But I’m pretty terrified of what they will do with Richard Jenkins (the Hakan character.) What happens to him in the book feels more like an American horror movie, so I’m worried that they’re going to include his overlong arc here. The book suffers when it loses focus on the two main characters and starts spending whole chapters talking about the secondary, less interesting characters. (Tommy, for instance.) It also makes the mistake of explaining away every little aspect of the characters. You know what Eli is, how she came to be, and the same with Hakan. It makes it lose a little bit of the mystery that made the film so effective.

I’d venture to say that the only part of the book that is stronger than the film is that Virginia and Lacke’s relationship is greatly expanded, and his offer of buying a home for them near the end actually has weight. Regardless, a great book, and absolutely worth a read after you’ve seen the film.

…you have seen the film by now, right?