Abigail is a 2024 film directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillet, with a screenplay written by Stephen Shields and Guy Busick. You may remember them for the fifth Scream instalment.
Originally going to be titled Dracula’s Daughter, after the 1963 film which it is based upon, it instead was greenlit to have complete free reign of creative agency to the team involved. This then became Abigail, which had a fairly limited cinema release in April before seeming to end up onto streaming services at the beginning of May. this at first didn’t instil a lot of confidence in me that this film was going to be any good. Especially considering this is loosely tied within Universal’s attempts to make a monster universe, akin to Marvel, by rebooting old horror classics in a new lenses. Considering how mixed the reception of these films have been thus far, it peaked my interest that what I had heard about the film was that it was pretty good.

So I decided to tune in myself for Abigail, for one I loved seeing Melissa Barrera (Joey) back in some horror shoes but under a different franchise so we can see some different levels of performance from what we were used to in Scream. Dan Stevens (Frank) played a fairly unlikeable ex-cop and worked as a pretty good adversary to Joey. Abigail played by Alisha Weir was also pretty incredible to watch, considering we have just recently had Megan, a ballerina dancing killer doesn’t quite have the same punch as it could have done if this was out the gates sooner. However it cannot be understated her ability to swing around in circles by running a long a corridor. A credit also to learning ballet specifically for this role and doing her own stunts.

Although most of the dialogue in this film is a borderline cringe-fest with the occasional try-harding of humour, I will admit that I did rather enjoy that the film didn’t take itself too seriously. I think at the end of the day, if it did, we all would have left feeling robbed for time. It’s embracing of the ridiculous, allowed for the shock moments to have real impacts. Exploding vampires, blood everywhere and bone crunching fight sequences eventually felt so worth it after sitting through quite a painful set up, with a bunch of characters that had no real chemistry (by design, they weren’t meant to know each other). Because of that I was screaming out for Abigail to do something, she was the reason everyone was there, the audience included, so it was a great payoff when we saw her toying with everyone.

The film also paid a wonderful tribute to Angus Cloud who sadly passed away during the filming of Abigail, we do have confirmation that his scenes were all filmed before his death. What a great legacy to have already at such a young age, his contribution in the film will forever be one of the stand-out moments in it and will be one of the things I know we all will remember and talk about after watching it for all time.

Overall Abigail was great fun to watch, especially if you fancy and easy to watch horror film without too much commitment and required attention to detail. Those are the types of horror films that people will come back to time and time again and I’m sure we will with Abigail.
You can see it’s cracks in the surface, you can feel the roughness around the edges but what you also see is a completely talented group of actors and actresses who come an put on a stellar performance for a blood-soaked ride of your life.

Feel Reel Rating: 6 / 10