Abigail Review: A Bloody Mess!

Just as vampires can never die, the popularity of the vampire craze will likely never diminish. From Bella Lagosi’s portrayal of Dracula in 1931 through the years to the 1980s with The Lost Boys, the 1990s with Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula, and into the mid 2000s with the success of vampire romance like Twilight, a current twist on the genre seems like it would be a great move for Universal Pictures with Abigail.

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Abigail is a young 12 year old ballerina who gets kidnapped by a group of “professionals” (with stars including Melissa Barrera, Dan Stevens, Kathryn Newton, Kevin Durand, Angus Cloud and WIlliam Catlett) with the intent of splitting a ransom sum of 50 million dollars. Without knowledge of the identity of the girl or her father, under the leadership of their boss for the mission Lambert (Giancarlo Esposito) the group soon realize they aren’t dealing with a little girl anymore, but instead a ballerina vampire.

Horror used to be dominated by the major studios, only in the last ten years or so, with independent horror successes like It Follows and The Witch, we began to see a pivot in popularity for smaller filmmakers and new visions of what the medium can be. This may be due to original scripts coming from these independent studios where major studios opted for the reboots and remakes.

Abigail was a fantastic opportunity to display how studio films can still succeed in making original horror films. Unfortunately, this film suffered from predictable storyboarding of its concept and conventions that added no bite. The ongoing idea in Abigail of one’s true identity begins to fall flat when it becomes painfully obvious as to who is behind the various “twists” and turns the film sets forth. It seems it is trying to stay one step ahead of the audience but fails to do so, making the scenes that lead up to them feel drawn out.

It almost seems like the team behind Abigail decided to stack the cast, knowing audiences would be drawn to them as characters, to outweigh the lack of writing to convince us why we should care otherwise. However, specifically Dan Stevens’ performance, the likeability of its cast is the one selling point of this movie, even if they are given little to work with. The characters were stereotyped versions of caricature for the most part, which was mind boggling considering the premise of the film is to expect the people to be different than they appear. However, the “differences” that break these stereotypes have already been done before, thus the film falls into familiar territory regardless.

The film has pacing issues where in the last forty minutes or so it feels like the film should be rapping up but instead there are too many themes and plot points trying to be added at the last minute that it feels like it drags. Just when you think it is ending, the filmmakers say “we aren’t finished quite yet!” which is fine unless it happens more than twice within 10 minutes.

Although, Abigail has its enjoyable moments when Dan Stevens or Melissa Barrera is on screen, and its premise is promising, Universal and directors Matt Bettinelli-Olphin and Tyler Gillett decided to turn back the clocks to bring us back to the studio horror films we were able to get away from for a while, for the better. As a result, even though we should never leave vampires in the past, it is a clear example as to why studios need to step up their game or leave the horror genre entirely.

‘Abigail’ Rating – 2.5/5

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