Look, I’m still figuring out what my approach to this site will be this time around. Do I need to exhaustively write about every movie I watch? Or, sometimes, can I let a film slip by without making it into boxing practice? I’ll figure it out, but in the meantime ready or not, here I am, trying to quantify some thoughts about the passive viewing experience that is Abigail.
In a season marked – so far – with a serious upswing of good horror, the trailer for Abigail has loomed as generic odd man out, a campy slumber party movie sandwiched between the cryptic first glances of films like Cuckoo, In a Violent Nature and Longlegs that seem cut to deny their viewer anything but a bad vibe. Before you get to the title card, the trailer has told you everything you need to know: a mismatched crew of strangers is tasked with kidnapping and minding a ballerina rich kid (Matilda’s Alisha Weir), taking her to a half-abandoned mansion as they wait to reap her daddy’s ransom. A final girl (Melissa Barrera) emerges from the pack of criminals – she’s a mom, she tells the girl not to worry, she has her own little boy – and then the fun begins. The kid is a vampire! A ballerina vampire! Who dances toward her kills for funsies! And, lo, they’re picked off, one by one, in a symphony of arterial spray.
If you’ve seen the trailer and have an ounce of horror smarts, you know precisely how Abigail plays out and could recite it, backwards and forwards. If you know it’s a film from the Radio Silence team of Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett (responsible for Ready or Not, 2022’s Scream and Scream VI), you might even be able to draft some of the jokes. There’s nothing inventive about Abigail‘s vision of vampirism, and really nothing that seems to be trying – in any meaningful way – to scare you. Its thrills are visible at a mile off, and it’s the equivalent of a Disney World starter coaster for people who don’t fare well with the genre: more speed and sharp corners than any sudden drops, a lot of excess bells, whistles and buckets of blood.
And that’s fun, I guess. A film doused in red is fun. A sadistic, ancient monster dressed up as a one-liner-spitting, bratty 12-year old princess is fun. A dumb, meat-puppet dance sequence towards death is fun. A creepy old mansion somewhere between Agatha Christie and the Addams Family, too, is a good enough time. And in many ways that, really, is that. Abigail is serviceable schlock, a live action cartoon with a generic cast of flat archetypes who do about as much as they can with a half-assed script that enjambs ways to pepper “fuck” into a sentence and thinks someone not knowing the difference between garlic and onions is a clever gag. It’s a hare-brained Scooby gang of actors – from Dan Stevens to Kathryn Newton – most of whom are compelling enough to keep the action from descending into tedium.
And, well, that’s really it. Radio Silence doesn’t seem to produce anything beyond a mess-loving, unobjectionable diversion, and – if the rest of this write-up hasn’t solidified this being the case – sometimes that’s just fine. However, in the wake of last year’s M3GAN – which managed both an uncanny valley creepiness and some unexpected points of capitalist satire alongside its camp – Abigail feels like it’s trying too hard and coming up short, building a whole story around a juxtaposed sight gag instead of figuring out why an immortal kid serial killer might be interesting.
love + squalor 