Director Matt Reeves (Cloverfield) spoke with MTV recently, detailing what viewers can expect from the upcoming vampire pic:

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 comparison to the original Swedish film, Reeves had this to say:

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.

Lastly, on the topic of the state of the vampire sub-genre today:

To me, the thing about genre stories that is the most interesting thing is what you do with the metaphor of the genre. You can do a grand, sweeping love story, like "Twilight," and use that metaphor of the two people that are just being torn apart and the aching-ness of it, and that's a great fantasy. I think that what people respond to in "Twilight" is the fantasy of it. It's such a grand, romantic fantasy, and in a way, the reason why I think there is room for a film like ours is, though it's a vampire film, it uses it in such a different way. Whereas "Twilight" is kind of a fantasy, this will be a darker, scarier kind of journey. Obviously, "True Blood" is also really big these days too, and that's a different thing using the sexual side. I think it's really about what sort of emphasis the story takes and how you use the metaphor. The amazing thing about genre films is the way to smuggle in different kinds of themes and things worthy of exploration. I think what so struck me about this story is that what it is exploring is so different and so real.

The rest of the interview can be read at MTV, while more info on the remake can be found by clicking here.