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Enjoy the power of blood cannons and go on a house tour with Kathryn Newton and the Abigail team
Featurettes: Universal Pictures

Abigail
Directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett
Rated R
Sucked 19 April 2024
#AbigailTheMovie

It’s a surprise Abigail doesn’t suck. It’s a bigger surprise how entertaining it is.

Tiny Dancer

Back in the day, they would’ve marketed a movie like Abigail with a shroud of secrecy.

A young girl — held captive by a gaggle of baddies — holds a terrible, horrible, devastating secret. Who is Abigail? What’s her secret?

But no.

It’s 2024.

The trailer for Abigail reveals all.

Sweet, innocent, blossoming 12-year-old ballerina Abigail is a vampire. And she’s held captive for a $50 million ransom by a collective of kidnappers who will all ultimately bite it. One. By. One.

Well, actually, the trailer doesn’t reveal everything. There is still a twist to this twisted tale.

And — no spoiler here — it turns into a well-conceived and well-executed romp through horror and vampire movie tropes. It’s bloody (the movie set sported a blood cannon), it’s disgusting (as in exploding bodies) and it’s a lot of fun.

Swan Lake

A calming sense of moviemaking competence sets in rather early in Abigail. As directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, the cinematic scream team behind the Scream reboot and Ready or Not, time is taken to introduce the kidnappers. As they get to know each, so does the audience. They’ve never worked together before and they don’t even know each other’s real names. (Similarly for the audience, as familiar as some of the cast members’ faces may be, there’s still a beneficial sense of freshness about them.)

There’s something about the dialogue. It’s crisp. It’s smarter than expected. It’s quotable. (“I like playing with my food” is one of the few quotes fit for publication here.) And it’s doubtless a mix of on-set improv and contributions from the directors’ frequent collaborator behind the keyboard, Guy Busick, and relative newcomer Stephen Shields.

They’ve been assigned names paying homage to the Rat Pack of the 1950s. There’s Joey (Melissa Barrera, Scream VI), Frank (Dan Stevens, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire), Sammy (Kathryn Newton, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania), Peter (Kevin Durand, Cosmopolis) and Dean (the late Angus Cloud, Euphoria). Thanks to some back-talk, there’s also Rickles (William Catlett, A Thousand and One), as in Don Rickles. Of course, all of the Rat Pack and Rickles were way before this group’s time. Peter is so oblivious to those landmark cultural icons (perhaps the original “influencers”), he refers to Don as “Wrinkles.”

Following an effective round robin discussion during which personalities and foibles are revealed, the house itself is explored. It’s a dilapidated mansion that would otherwise have aspired to be another Wayne Manor. Plenty of eccentricities fill the rooms. In addition to all the interior decorating and curiosities, there’s also a sense of eerie history.

It all adds to the experience. Some cheap scares. Some good jolts. Some over-the-top vampire violence. And some big laughs. In a way, it’s not only an homage to vampire movies, it’s also an homage to ‘80s movies like Fright Night and even Gremlins. There’s laughter amid the shock.

There’s also delight in the physicality of the on-set, practical horror effects. The “blood cannon” is a gory shocker that also fits in with the overall tone of the movie. Horror, yes. Shock, yes. And yet it’s still a fun part of this moviegoing experience.

Dark Universe

When Universal unleashed The Mummy starring Tom Cruise in 2017, it was the first entry in what was supposed to be the Dark Universe. The classic horror movies equivalent to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. There was only one problem. The Mummy suffered from a terrible story and a horrible concept for the lead character. Those big plans were scaled back with Leigh Whannell’s completely different and modern (and not necessarily better) take on The Invisible Man. Whannell’s version of Wolf Man is expected next year.

But Abigail could fit right in with that Dark Universe. It’s a reimagining of Universal’s classic horror history, obviously including Dracula, in a tale told with modern sensibilities, but it also holds onto that heritage in ways Whannell’s Invisible Man did not.

There’s talk about Abigail (Alisha Weir, Matilda: The Musical) and how her father doesn’t care about her. He’ll never pay that exorbitant ransom. Her father is the stuff of urban legend. A gangster — a kingpin — named Christoph Lazar. His name alone strikes fear in the kidnappers once they get a better sense of who they’re getting paid to hold captive for 24 hours.

It’s all a grand setup in a creepy house with references to Agatha Christie, Bram Stoker and even Stephenie Meyer.

• Review originally published at MovieHabit.com.