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
