Review
Abigail review – Dracula’s daughter gets kidnapped in fun-sucking horror

There’s some low-stakes pleasure to be had in the first half of the gory new film from the team behind Ready or Not and Scream but things fall apart disastrously
Benjamin Lee

Last year’s handsome gothic horror The Last Voyage of the Demeter and bombastic Nic Cage comedy Renfield allowed Universal the opportunity to present known IP as something fresh, at least on the surface, stories involving Dracula but told in ways we hadn’t seen before. They represented a nifty marketing strategy for a back catalogue of classic monster movies but both worked better as loglines than finished films – Dracula on a boat, Dracula as a bad boss – and audiences proved as uninterested as critics, the stench of old property distracting from the promise of something new.
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As the studio preps a new take on The Wolf Man with next year’s Christopher Abbott-led Wolfman and Robert Eggers’ remake of the Dracula-inspired Nosferatu, here comes Abigail, a poppy reimagining of the little-remembered 1936 horror Dracula’s Daughter. In the contemporary take, she’s a ballerina (Matilda’s Alisha Weir) who gets kidnapped by a group of unaware criminals, hired to keep her locked in a grand old house for 24 hours while ransom money is obtained. But early on, recovering addict and single mother Joey (Melissa Barrera) figures out that something is up and starts to realise that the scared little girl in their care might not be so scared after all.

Abigail comes from Radio Silence, the team who broke out with 2019’s smug yet successful Ready or Not, a gimmicky thriller about a new bride forced to play a deadly game of hide and seek that started with real fizz before turning flat. There’s a similarly precipitous dip here, directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett again crafting a fun conceit with returning writer Guy Busick (here writing alongside Stephen Shields), but without the follow-through. It has the same arch comedy-horror tone, as gory as it is goofy, but it’s missing the touch of a real comedy writer (making it the second film this year after Godzilla x Kong where Dan Stevens has to play comic support without the support of his screenwriter). Set-ups for jokes are left as just that and our wait for any form of payoff starts to mirror the plot at large, our wait for a premise to become a real movie proving similarly endless.

Abigail is out in US and UK cinemas on 19 April