"Abigail" opened last week. But it was preceded by a trailer that eagerly revealed the title character was vampire and gave away many of the kills and jumpscares.
I generally try to avoid trailers before seeing a film, especially if it's one I am looking forward to or a horror movie. Studios these days seem compelled to reveal everything in a trailer. So I had to ask "Abigail's" filmmakers — Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett of Radio Silence — if that's a challenge.
"It's a really good question," Tyler Gillett said. "I think that one of the challenges of making a theatrical movie now, particularly if it's an original theatrical movie, is you have to get butts in seats. That's just part of the assignment. I think we knew going into this movie that Abigail and that reveal was going to be something that the studio would use.
"And I think the thing that we learned or maybe the opportunity that presented was to just make sure that we were looking at the design of the movie outside of what that twist specifically was, and to make sure that all of the beats with the characters, all of the moments leading up to that reveal and all of the moments that follow that reveal were as interesting, and as taut, and as funny, and as filled with character as we could. And I think for us, it was really about holding our feet to the fire to make sure that, yeah, you know that the girl is a vampire. But what else is the movie offering?" he said.
Well, it offers a group of misfit characters who have kidnapped a young girl named Abigail after her ballet class. She's the daughter of a rich and powerful man and they are holding her for a large ransom. All they have to do is keep her confined in a house till the ransom is delivered. But as the trailer clearly explains, they get more than they bargained for.
Although the twist is not a surprise, Gillett and co-director Matt Bettinelli-Olpin do try to add other unexpected elements regarding character interaction, action sequences, and a tasty third act cameo.
One of the things they enjoy and know how to do well is to trap their cast in the single location of a weird old house. They did that with their earlier, thoroughly fun horror film "Ready or Not," and they take delight in doing it again with "Abigail."
"There's just something we love about getting a cast of eclectic, interesting characters together, applying some outside pressure, and having them be forced to deal with whatever that pressure is and each other. And there's something about a big old creepy house that just allows that to happen really nicely," explained Bettinelli-Olpin. "And there's something about an old house with a fireplace. It gives this warmth and comfort even though there's a lot of blood and a lot of violence. But it's almost like we're making comfort movies, but they're horror movies."
And the particular house they chose for "Abigail" is Glenmaroon House in Dublin, Ireland.
"I think the thing that was ultimately so interesting and why we made the choice was that it had this labyrinthian quality to it that we just knew was going to be so much fun to transpose our action sequences, our chase sequences over," Gilett said.
"And one of the things that's very much born of our indie sensibility in our early work is actually going into a location and not being so rigid with what the story is that we're not willing for the location to shift it and shape it and evolve it. And one of the fun challenges of the movie was to walk through that space with our production design crew and talk about it with our stunt crew and talk about like, 'Oh, what if this happened here? What if we added this beat?'"
The house does provide some inspired locations for action and for just general atmosphere. In a sense it becomes a playground for Abigail, who, as the trailer tells us, likes to play with her food.
The image of a ballerina vampire does make for good marketing but it wasn't initially a strong focus.
"It's funny, the ballerina aspect of it was not a huge part when we first got interested in it," Bettinelli-Olpin said. "It was a heist movie that gets hijacked by a vampire movie, and there was this little flavor that she's a ballerina at the beginning. And then when we met Alisha (Weir, the actress playing Abigail) and found out she's a really good dancer and a very quick learner, we decided, 'Oh, we could steer into this a little more.' And then that just evolved from there, from conversations with our production designer and with costumes and with Alisha and our choreographer, just making it more more a part of the identity of the movie. And now it's the poster of the movie."
Although "Abigail" and "Ready or Not" are soaked in blood, they both also display humor. And for the filmmakers, humor and horror have similar beats of build up and pay off.
"One hundred percent they are very similar," Bettinelli-Olpin said. "They're also two emotions that if you're in a theater with other people, they're contagious. If everybody laughs, it's a great feeling. If everybody's scared, you feel it. If everybody gasped, you feel it. It's not intellectual, it's physical. And so for us, they're already closely tied. But it's just really about setting guardrails and then holding our feet to the fire throughout the process, the writing, the production in post, always challenging ourselves to be like, 'Oh, this is really funny, but is it too funny?' And it happens on every movie. There's things that we love and are so funny, but they then unravel the magic trick of making those tones exist together."
"Abigail" is currently in cinemas where you can watch with the contagious laughter and gasps of an audience. Radio Silence's "Ready or Not," which remains my favorite of theirs, is currently streaming on multiple platforms including Prime Video, Hulu, Fandango at Home, and YouTube.
