Director Matt Reeves (Cloverfield)  is aware of the skepticism surrounding his remake of the 2008 Swedish vampire film Let the Right One In. In a recent interview with MTV, Reeves assured fans that the film, now entitled Let Me In, remains centered on the coming-of-age relationship between a young boy and his vampire girlfriend/guardian, but will translate the story to better suit American sensibilities.

Reeves said:

It’s very much an Americanization of the tale that John Ajvide Lindqvist tells. The film touched me. And I read the book, which he also wrote, and it moved me too. It reminded me so much of my own childhood in certain ways. It’s so much about that period of preadolescence, that feeling of being a child and of being bullied, the difficulties of growing up. It’s such a beautiful coming-of-age story, in addition to being such a terrific genre story.

One of the things I really wanted to do was find my own way into the story while still being very, very reverent to the beautiful film and to the wonderful story that they created. And so the story in many ways follows the same trajectory. I really wanted to put you, even more so, into the point of view of the boy and understand his childhood as vividly as it comes across in the book.

In a certain way, there has been a real bull’s-eye on the movie, because people had so much love for that [original] film. I share that love, and for me, what was important was to have reverence for the original while at the same time trying to find the way to make it our own.

That has been what this process is about, to really want to mine the foundations of that story. It’s about the details and the things that make it an American story and putting it in an American context and the things that I relate to from my childhood and the things that the actors bring.

Let Me In stars 13-year-old Kodi Smit-McPhee (The Road) and 12-year-old Chloe Moretz (Kick Ass) in the lead roles. The film arrives in theaters on Oct. 1.