Abigail is a gloriously gory vampire horror movie. The new Melissa Barrera and Dan Stevens-led film is now playing in theaters.
In their first foray out of the world of franchise filmmaking in five years, directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett have delivered Abigail. A blood-soaked, modern-day riff on the oft-forgotten 1936 monster movie Dracula’s Daughter, the new film has more in common with its directors’ 2019 breakout horror hit Ready or Not than it does to their two most recent outings, 2022’s Scream 5 and 2023’s Scream 6. Its tone is, like Ready or Not, pure black comedy, and its set pieces are covered in just as much blood and guts as that Samara Weaving-led thriller about an unsuspecting bride who finds herself caught in the middle of a wealthy family’s satanic ritual.
This is, for the most part, a good thing. Scaring you to death has never been Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett’s greatest strength, but they have always had a knack for sending up genre conventions and shredding your nerves with action sequences that are as playful as they are gruesome. In Abigail, the duo has done both of those things and made a contemporary vampire movie that doesn’t have much of a brain, but offers plenty of bite.
Penned by Stephen Shields and Ready or Not co-writer Guy Busick, Abigail sees Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett return to the world of single-location horror. Its prologue follows Joey (Melissa Barrera), who’s both a recovering addict with a sweet tooth and an absent mother with a guilty conscience, as she meets up with Frank (Dan Stevens), Sammy (Kathryn Newton), Rickles (William Catlett), Peter (Kevin Durand), and Dean (the late Angus Cloud), the other members of a criminal crew assembled to kidnap Abigail Lazar (Alisha Weir), the young ballerina daughter of the powerful Kristof Lazar (Matthew Goode). The film’s opening minutes see its central crew cleanly capture and transport their target away from the safety of her and her father’s well-guarded home.
Once they’ve arrived at their remote safe house, their boss, Lambert (an underused Giancarlo Esposito), takes the criminals’ phones and informs them that all they have to do is guard Weir’s Abigail for the 24 hours it’ll take to receive a multimillion-dollar ransom from her father.
