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FANG GIRL
ABIGAIL The Scream team is back with a heist/ vampire movie full of biting twists and turns.
Directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, who together with producer Chad Villella form the filmmaking collective Radio Silence, are pondering just how bloody their new movie is. They’re no strangers to pumping plasma, having made Ready or Not, Scream and Scream VI. But vampire flick Abigail is set to turn up the hose setting as they put the ‘eww’ into crucifix.
‘I mean, all of our movies are bloody, and I would say that this is definitely the most bloody,’ says Gillett, looking to his partner for confirmation.
Bettinelli-Olpin grins, saying, ‘We spent a lot of time apologising to our actors on this movie! I mean, blood is in the DNA of a vampire movie. And the amount of blood work in this one is…’ Now Gillett is grinning, too. ‘It’s pretty extreme! But it’s still fun.’
Extreme but still fun is these guys’ raison d’être. For while all of their previous movies have been funny and knowing, they retain a serrated edge. Like the genre movies they grew up devouring in the 80s – The Thing, The Terminator, The Fly, Aliens and Predator all get a namecheck – Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett revel in genuinely nasty scares while going about the business of entertaining.
‘We’re playing it serious,’ says Gillett. ‘We’re dealing with absolutely bananas nonsense, but we take absurd things seriously.’ Bettinelli-Olpin cuts in. ‘We talk a lot about taking every genre that we’re mixing very seriously. The heist movie in this is a fucking serious heist movie, and the monster movie is a serious monster movie, and the character stuff is really emotional and earnest.’
Radio Silence attached themselves to Abigail – or Abducting Abigail, as it was then titled – in early 2023. A draft had been written by Stephen Shields, and Universal was looking for a director who could match the energy of the concept: a group of criminals kidnap the ballerina daughter of a powerful underground figure, only to discover she’s a vampire.
Radio Silence thought that a heist movie colliding with a monster movie was ‘just a super-fun, really sticky concept’, says Bettinelli-Olpin, and things moved fast. Within 48 hours, the project was greenlit, Radio Silence’s regular scribe, Guy Busick, was on rewrite duties, and new pages were arriving as the guys entered pre-production.
For the mansion where the kidnappers hole up with their tutuand-teeth charge, an old, dark house was found outside of Dublin, its various repairs and extensions giving it a weirdly anachronistic feel. And for the cast, they hit gold: Matilda’s Alisha Weir, who brings with her a dance background, signed on as Abigail, while Dan Stevens, Kathryn Newton, Kevin Durand, Angus Cloud (who, sadly, passed away after finishing his scenes), Giancarlo Esposito and William Catlett play the crims. Leader of the pack, though, is Melissa Barrera as Joey.
‘She’s a very smart woman who’s had a tough life,’ says the actor, who here teams with Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett for a third time, having played Sam Carpenter in their Scream movies. ‘Obviously, she’s not a saint. She’s here to kidnap a girl. They’re all very questionable characters, and I think that’s what’s important to remember. These people are all dealing with something that led them to this life. The characters were so beautifully written, with distinct personalities, but each actor came in with a proposal of doing something different, and Matt and Tyler get really excited when actors do something surprising. It makes for a very compelling movie where you actually care about all of the characters.’
‘Character twists and monster twists’ is how Bettinelli-Olpin puts it. To avoid becoming food, the kidnappers must get to know each other and trust each other by losing their posturing and pretences. And as this is happening, they, along with viewers, learn exactly what Abigail is capable of. For Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett, it was a blast to put their spin on vampire lore.
‘There was a foundation that felt traditional, and that gave us an opportunity to fuck with all of these traditions and tropes,’ says Gillett. ‘We took the lore, which is very hodgepodgey, depending on which movies are canon to you, and we did our version of that.’
Barrera loved it. Growing up, she adored vampires, gulping down True Blood, The Vampire Diaries and the Twilight films. To reteam with Radio Silence on an original IP bloodsucker movie was a dream.
‘They have the best energy and treat everyone with respect and make everything fun,’ she says. ‘There’s such a shorthand now. We just can read each other’s minds. It was really, really nice to go into this new world where we don’t have the pressures of a franchise that you’re tiptoeing around. We get to do this whole different thing.’
Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett agree. ‘On Scream, I think we were always rattle-testing ideas up against what a Scream movie should be,’ explains Bettinelli-Olpin. ‘But in making Abigail, the only thing that we were testing our ideas against was: “Is it weird enough? Is it fun enough? Is it scary enough?”’
‘I’m really excited for this movie to come out, and for people to see how Matt and Tyler’s brains actually work,’ says Barrera. ‘I feel like this movie is really violent.’ She says it like it’s a good thing, which, of course, it is: you need only look at early Peter Jackson and Sam Raimi movies to know just how much fun gallons of gore can be. But, really, is it that bloody?
Barrera beams. ‘Whatever you can imagine, that’s not even 10% of it.’
ABIGAIL OPENS IN CINEMAS ON 19 APRIL.
‘There was a foundation that felt traditional. We took the lore and did our version of that’
TYLER GILLETT