Abigail Review

Abigail comes from the team behind Ready or Not and the Scream legacy sequels. This horror-crime mash-up sees a group of criminals battling with a pre-teen vampire.

A crew of criminals is hired by Lambert (Giancarlo Esposito) to kidnap the daughter of a wealthy individual. One member of the crew, Joey (Melissa Barrera) is assigned the task of looking after the girl, Abigail (Alisha Weir), and forms a bond. However, there is more to the girl than she first appears as it seems like the crew has crossed a powerful crime lord.

Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett have had great success in the horror-comedy genre. Even with a film I didn’t like so much, Scream VI, it still had some excellent sequences, like the Ghostfaces on the subway. With Abigail, they aimed to make a straight-up gore fest. The BBFC gave Abigail an 18 rating for ‘shootings, stabbings, bites, severed limbs, and bodies exploding, showering surroundings and other people with blood and viscera.’ Universal should put that on the poster.

There point where Abigail was revealed to be a vampire was when the film became a bloody affair. This appealed to the adolescent part of my brain, especially when bodies started to explode. There were some creative scenes like when Abigail was exposed to sunlight and showing what happened to Abigail’s previous victims. The scene in the swimming pool was genuinely horrifying. Abigail will play well with gorehounds and even though it’s an 18, it probably would please a teenage audience.

The marketing and trailers for Abigail focused on the title character and showed she was a vampire. It played up on the fact it was about a vampire ballerina. However, in the film it was made out to be a big twist and any audience members going in blind will be surprised that it turned from a crime-thriller to a horror film. This made Abigail similar to From Dusk to Dawn which was also a crime film turned into a vampire flick at the halfway point of the film.

Abigail matched From Dusk to Dawn’s tone since it started like a Quentin Tarantino crime film. The characters were given fake names based on the Rat Pack like the criminals in Reservoir Dogs being named after colours. There were quick dialogue exchanges and colourful characters which fitted the Tarantino mould, like when Joey was able to guess all her colleagues’ backstories. From Dusk to Dawn also featured a kidnapping plot, and the second half of both films was about criminals trapped in a building and having to fight for survival. The homages to crime films also extended to a scene that felt similar to the ‘90s crime classic The Usual Suspects.

Abigail also bore some similarities to the second Predator movie, Predators. In that film, a group of bad people were abducted by the Yautja so they could be hunted on a game preserve. Abigail was about a group of criminals being the playthings for a vampire. They have all done bad things, ranging from violence to financial skimming. It allowed the audience to have a sadistic glee when the characters were tortured and killed. Joey was made out to be the most sympathetic out of the crew since she was the one with a conscience because she was shocked that she was hired to kidnap a kid, and she formed a rapport with Abigail before the vampire revealed her true colours. On the opposite side of the scale was Frank (Dan Stevens), the most self-servicing and outright villain, a man willing to threaten a child and screw over anyone in his way. Joey and Frank were chalk and cheese, yet they also had shared skills in perception.

The team behind Abigail was able to get a hell of a cast. There’s Barrera from the Scream films, Dan Stevens appearing in another B-Movie-inspired role, following on from The Guest and Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, and Kathryn Newton was showing off her scream queen credential. Abigail gave Alisha Weir her follow-up role to her debut in Matilda the Musical and she relished the opportunity to play an evil creature of the night.

There was an attempt to give the film some substance with its theme of parenthood. Joey was an absentee mother who wanted to obtain a lot of money before reuniting with her son. Abigail was rejected by her father. These familial issues ended up giving Joey and Abigail a bond at the beginning of the film due to Joey’s motherly instinct.

Abigail was a film for people who like their films to have a gonzo quality to them. It was a gloriously bloody B-movie that gorehounds would enjoy.