Abigail (2024 vampire movie)

Depending on how childlike she really is, it might be less that she's "in on it" with him and more that he's doing it for her, and to her it's just a treat that she's come to consider to be a usual part of her life.

Every so often, Daddy/Uncle/Whatever Giancarlo takes her to the sweety-playground. :P

Also, we still don't know if the girl is Affably Evil/Faux Affably Evil, or a genuinely sweet girl with an evil side that she can't control.

> The concept of being immortalized as a minor has always seemed crazy and somewhat sad to me.

and gross

I mean the sole reason it's interesting is because it's tragic.

I mean a lot of people struggle with a similar condition in RL.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Jan 20th 2024 at 1:03:00 AM

I do know that,but I'm also more aware of how its depicted in fiction.

And almost any relationship you are in will be seen as No Yay or Squick.

If you decide to be in a relationship with an adult, then many viewers will be shocked that someone who looks like a child dates an adult.

If you decide to be in a relationship with a child, then many viewers will be shocked that someone who is actually an adult in a child's body is dating a real child.

Your only hope is to find another immortal child.

Edited by Luisdalas on Jan 20th 2024 at 1:42:21 AM

I mean, you're an immortal cannibal serial killer either way.

Yeah. That the trailer can keep us guessing right now as to how it's gonna go is indeed a good sign. That it has such a fascinating cast of characters with a talented set of actors is a good sign too.

I'm mostly interested in this for the opportunity to see Giancarlo Esposito as a horror movie villain. He's consistently been a scary villain in action and dramas, so it'd be neat to see him fit the genre for a change.

It could be fun to have some sort of mixing between Dracula and Home Alone...

Having Melissa Barrera be the badass Final Girl again and Kathryn Newton as the Cloudcuckoolander apparently, I'm very optimistic. Giancarlo Esposito looks like he's playing a William Afton-type role too. Abigail herself may not be bad and just simply his personal instrument of destruction.

We shall see when we see.

Edited by futuremoviewriter on Jan 25th 2024 at 9:20:27 AM

She...seems pretty bad.

I know there was a post earlier about her potentially being Affably Evil, but she seems really happy to try and kill them all. She even says she likes playing with her food.

Granted, there will probably be some of moments of empathy between her and "Joey" but all indications are that Abigail is not going to be your tortured angsty vampire and more of your modern, apex predator type vampire.

The part that confuses me is 2 minutes 25 seconds into the trailer - we see Abigail dancing ballet-style and then, I think, Kathryn Newton's character is doing a similar dance.

Is she a vampire, a ghoul, or being hypnotized into mimicking her I wonder.

Yeah. They seem to be implying that she'll be turned by Abigail at some point it seems.

New preview for the movie:

And a clip:

Edited by BigBadShadow25 on Apr 4th 2024 at 2:02:14 PM

I love seeing Melissa get more focus than the recent marketing was giving her. Excited to see it soon.

Planning to go on 4/20 as is.

The first trailer showed me just enough that I was curious but I didn't feel like I knew where things were going.

A behind the scenes video:

Just got back from seeing this at the drive-in theater. My son insisted; he loves horror movies. I'm ambivalent; as I've said many times, horror for horror's sake has no interest for me at all. I'm not into gore or being jump scared. I mainly like to play "guess the cliché" and "who's going to die next".

I knew very little about Abigail going in; I didn't even watch the trailer. All I did was look it up on IMDB, and so I knew there would be vampires involved. My summary is: it's not bad. It manages to keep my interest just enough by casting fun characters and having them not all be complete morons. Well, some are, but that's actually justified enough that it works.

I was at some points getting vibes of The Usual Suspects, trying to guess what the cast knew at any given time, combined with a bit of Clue as people wandered around this giant mansion, variously in pairs and alone, getting hunted down and/or toyed with like a cat with a cage full of mice.

I'll folderize spoilers from here, just in case.

Breaking from that, how's the actual horror? Kind of shitty, as it turns out. Aside from a couple of cheap jump scares toward the end of the first act, there is very little to frighten. It's all by-the-numbers: really cheap looking gore, a few modestly interesting twists, and a bunch of choppily edited action scenes with no particular emotional weight.

I guess we're past the point of the horror genre being scary and instead are trying to build new franchises. Fair enough. Abigail does enough things right that it might pull that off. I hear M3GAN is getting a sequel, so why not this one too? At least these vampires explode in sunlight instead of sparkling. How our standards have fallen.

Someone in this movie's team was a little too fond of the Covered in Gunge and Blood-Spattered Innocents tropes. I don't get it — is it supposed to be frightening, gross, or just weird?

Addressing some points from earlier, Abigail is unquestionably evil. She's got her own little murder palace here where she eliminates her daddy's enemies for him. Sure, it's at least in part because she doesn't get affection from him, but they're both freaking vampires. This isn't a "poor widdle baby" situation.

She only gets sympathetic when Joey shows her actual kindness, which is maybe a redeeming trait? I don't know. It's very ambiguous, and probably more sequel bait.

And yes, the dancing scene is kind of awesome.

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 20th 2024 at 1:35:51 PM

I feel like they definitely wanted Abigail to feel like an innocent young person, but also tried to invite us to view her in that context by making the victims as horrible as possible. But they half-assed it, because the victims felt like they were supposed to be sympathetic but simultaneously kind of horrible?

Edited by Prowler on Apr 20th 2024 at 11:45:14 AM

In the context of the film, all of the "victims" have a backstory that makes them at least understandable if not exactly sympathetic. They've all made bad choices in their lives and had bad things happen to them that weren't necessarily their fault. It's an atypically nuanced portrayal.

In particular, we see parental neglect from both the parent's and "child's" perspective, and are invited to at least empathize with those issues. Some might call Joey a bad person, for example, and she does help kidnap a child, but she also shows kindness to that child and seems to be making an effort to not be as shitty as she could be.

We aren't supposed to regard criminals as subhuman these days. It's politically incorrect. Regardless, I don't think that justice is served by having them get eaten by a vampire. That's definitely a violation of their due process. Well, all except Dean. I cheered when he died.

I like it when characters in a horror cast have interesting things going on in their heads: when they aren't just caricatures standing in for various sins that the monster can bring to summary justice.

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 20th 2024 at 1:48:47 PM

My original version of my post was much longer, where I tried to point out that, yeah, they did kind of make Abigail, and some of the criminals, sympathetic, but they also made every party wretched at the same time? It honestly felt like a muddle between multiple writers, and I can't escape that conclusion, especially when the creators themselves say there was a different final threat in every draft.

Reminds me of Ebert's Jingle All the Way review: We're never really allowed to decide whether any given character is a villain, a victim, or a figure of fun, and so they're confusingly swapped out for any, for the sake of convenience, at any given moment.

That being said, I still liked it far more than these guys's Scream movies, mostly because those had much tighter scripts than the Universal Dracula movies this took a degree of inspiration from.

I mean I haven't seen it but you two are the first two I have seen say anything bad about it online. Most I have seen found it scary and well done.

Well, I'm in the camp that all that matters is what we see in the final cut, not what got thrown out in the writers' room. Obviously Joey is set up to be the Final Girl from the start, since she's the only one who seems to object to the idea of kidnapping a twelve-year-old girl. So while we have to adhere to the list of horror movie tropes, it's clearly setting up her kindness to be rewarded at the end. Nothing inconsistent there.

Her daddy is a bit of a space whale in terms of the plot, but I'll chalk that up to sequel bait.

It's better done than many other horror films I've seen, mainly in terms of making the cast distinct enough to be interesting as more than points on a scoreboard, but I really have to wonder who would actually find it scary. The gore is perhaps the silliest part of the movie. I've seen more disturbing imagery in films from the eighties.

Freddy Kreuger ripping someone's blood vessels from their arms and puppeteering them around got to me far more than someone getting hit by a beam of sunlight and exploding into red food coloring. It's gross, sure, but I can't imagine any devoted horror fans actually finding it frightening.

In general, the monster VFX in this film are sub-par.

Edit: Between this and M3GAN, is every movie with a Monster Girl obligated to have her put on a choreographed dance routine? I don't mind necessarily, but is it supposed to be sinister or funny?

The thing about horror movies for me is that I'm rarely immersed in them. I see them as a box full of tropes, since they're so inherently silly that I have virtually no suspension of disbelief. A film actually getting me to let go of my skepticism is a rarity, and Abigail managed that in a few places.

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 20th 2024 at 2:13:08 PM

Frank did come off as monstrous and was the least sympathetic of the group.