‘Abigail’ Is Scary, Gory, and a Fresh-Blood Transfusion of Vampire-Ballerina Fun
Stop me if you think that you’ve heard this one before: Some criminals abduct a rich guy’s child and demand a hefty sum to give the youngster back. The “victim” then proceeds to make life hell for the kidnappers. It’s more or less the plot of The Ransom of Red Chief, arguably O. Henry’s best-known work. And like a lot of people who’ve read this enduring staple of school-reading curricula over the decades, you probably got to the final paragraph (“And as dark as it was, and as fat as Bill was, and as good a runner as I am, he was a good mile and a half out of Summit before I could catch up with him”), slowly closed the book, and thought to yourself: This story needed way, way more vampires.
It’s admittedly a shame that Abigail, the new horror film from the Ready or Not/Scream reboot duo of Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, has been upfront about the fact that bloodsuckers run amuck in their raucous, gory, brutal and semi-brilliant spin on that old narrative chestnut. If you’ve seen the trailer, you already understand the exact nature of how the tables get turned on the movie’s hapless band of crooks. Spoilers regarding these kidnappers being stalked, and that the little girl they’re holding for ransom is not quite the helpless innocent they thought she was, and how heads are gonna roll — like, actual heads genuinely rolling after having been liberated from the bodies they were attached to only moments before — and jugulars are gonna get bit have been part of the marketing from the jump. You can put all the prepubescent ballerinas in Type O-splattered tutus on the posters you want. Eventually, you’re going to need to bare some jagged fangs to get horror-fanatic asses in seats.
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The good news is that, even though this particular secret is out in the open, it’s not the only thing that this sly genre mash-up has going for it. Having worked as two-thirds of the filmmaking trio known as Radio Silence, Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett made a name for themselves as practitioners of short, sharp scares laced heavily with dark meta-commentary and even darker comedy. Not that they let jabs at, say, America’s class warfare or the peccadillos of the perverse One-percent get in the way of exploding bodies (and they do love a good exploding body or two). But they’re smart creators of all-out carnage, and know exactly how jerk viewers around so that the eventual payoff for all that nerve-jangling feels earned. The two make clever thrill rides. Abigail is a textbook example of what they do best.
After the ragtag recruits for this specific snatch-and-grab have the 12-year-old Abigail (Alisha Weir) in their possession, they rendezvous with their primary contact, Lambert (Giancarlo Esposito). Once the child’s dad delivers the $50 million ransom, they all go home rich. Meanwhile, the gang just needs to lay low for 24 hours in the conspicuously spooky mansion he’s chosen for their safe house. They’ve all been given code names, based on the Rat Pack: Frank (Dan Stevens) is an ex-cop and de facto leader of the operation. Dean (Angus Cloud) is the wheelman. Sammy (Kathyrn Newton) is the resident hacker/tech geek. Peter (Kevin Durand) is the muscle. Rickles (Will Catlett), who’s handy with a sniper rifle, acts as the lookout.
And then there’s Joey (Melissa Barrera, star of Scream and numerous recent headlines). She’s the only one who’s supposed to directly engage with Abigail, and is clearly the most nurturing and morally sound of the motley crew. As bits of respective back stories get bantered about, we find out that she’s an Army medic, a mother and a recovering junkie. Also, because she’s played by Barrera — who’s exceedingly good at both reporting for “final girl” duty and engaging in horror-movie survivalist scrapping — she clearly has the best chance of walking away with her organs untouched and her veins untapped. I’m sorry for what’s going to happen to you, Abigail cryptically says to her captor. At least Joey gets an apology. The others aren’t so lucky.
From here, Abigail leans heavily on the legacy of every previous film in which the creatures of the night howl and prey, trapped folks find their numbers dwindling one by one, and every shadow hides some sort of secret. People used to refer to Alien as a haunted house movie in space; you could easily describe this as “Alien but in an old dark house, and if the Xenomorph was really graceful at pirouettes.” Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None is used as a red herring at one point, and when somebody mentions the possibility of a vampire as the reason behind the growing body count, somebody counters with “What are we talking about: Anne Rice? True Blood? Twilight? Lotta different types of vampires.” Traditional methods of dispatching the living dead are debated. Garlic and crosses? Not so effective on this particular predator. Daylight? Yup, that one still works like a charm in terms of vampire control.
It’s a gas, watching this ensemble bouncing off each other when the shit goes down and navigating the obstacle course that Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett have set for them in the film’s chaotic, mondo bloody back half. (We weren’t joking about that whole exploding body thing.) Stevens has previously shown a knack for playing complicated douchebags, and that talent becomes refined here. Weir, who’s a bit of a find in terms of playing a centuries-old fiend in the body of a tween, puts a sickly, sharp spin on a lot of her juicier lines. Cloud (R.I.P.) and Durand finds different ways of showcasing the dim-wittery of their characters, Newton once again reminds you that she’s a first-rate pickpocket when it comes to stealing scenes, and Barrera steps into the role as steely scream queen extraordinaire in a way that makes you hope she really does have a long career in front of her instead of an aborted one already behind her.
One of the many casualties of moviemaking and moviegoing in the year of our lord 2024 has been a real, honest sense of fun — even the summer-movie tentpoles and Friday-night-at-the-multiplex fare now often feel painfully rote, bled dry, left to suffer a death by thousand clichés and pandering gestures and second guesses about what people want to see. You can blame Abigail for a number of things, from cutting narrative-logic corners when its convenient to a few facepalm-worthy plot surprises to petering out with a guest-star climax. What you can’t accuse it of, however, is not having a sense of fun as it works a lot of horror-flick conventions into a blood-red forth. There’s a playful joie de morte in the way it treats and tweaks vampire lore, as well as the fact it doesn’t let a tongue-in-cheek approach get in the way of its feral incisors. We’re sure this will inevitably be sequeled into oblivion. For now, however, it’s a welcome transfusion of fresh blood into a genre that could definitely use it.
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