Editorials
‘Abigail’ – Meet the Criminals Behind the Heist-Turned-Vampire Horror Movie [Set Visit]
The latest from directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, Abigail, transforms a heist movie into a full-blown vampire horror movie blood bath. What sounds like absolute bad news for the would-be criminals tasked with what seems like an easy job should make for an entertaining thrill ride for audiences.
As for those would-be criminals, Bloody Disgusting learned more about the key players in Abigail when invited to set last summer in Ireland.
The first scene observed on set introduced the group, handpicked to kidnap the 12-year-old ballerina daughter of a powerful underworld figure. They’ve just arrived at their eerie destination after a successful grab. From the grand staircase in the sprawling estate’s foyer, a commanding Lambert (Giancarlo Esposito) lays out the ground rules of the kidnapping as he takes their cellphones. The group is given fake names corresponding with members of the Rat Pack to preserve their anonymity, with the added horror bonus of telling audiences not to get too attached.
But who are these characters?
Of his intimidating character Lambert and the script, Esposito tells us, “The first couple of pages are really captivating; they were for me when I read them. I went, ‘Wow, what a great set piece in the beginning.’ Then I come into the film, and I’m taking charge and telling people what this job is, which ostensibly is a kidnapping. I have to do that convincingly for the film afterward to work.”
Expect Lambert to be very untrustworthy, as Esposito warns that “there’s a little tinge of him being resentful about” Lambert’s position.
In the scene, Dan Stevens’ Frank appears to be working directly for Lambert as his second in command during this operation. The horror stalwart describes his role within the group, “Because of the nature of this motley group, it initially follows quite classic heist movie tropes where you’ve got the wheels, the getaway driver, and you’ve got the tech girl who’s going to hack the computers, and then you’ve got the medic who’s going to administer the sleeping drugs. Then you’ve got Kevin Durand playing the muscle or whatever. Everyone seemed to have a very, very clear role in this band of criminals. And then there’s Frank, who just seemed to be an asshole. That seemed to be his special skill, really. We could never quite figure out what he was doing there. For all intents and purposes, he was the boss of the group. So maybe that’s it. Maybe bosses are just assholes, I don’t know. But that really seemed to be his special skill. That and cursing frequently. That’s definitely one of his special skills.”
Stevens certainly looks the part of an ex-cop turned mob henchman, and it turns out that he had a lot of input on his character’s design.
He explained, “That was a collaborative effort really with costume designer and directors and myself and just sort of an interesting shopping trip in Dublin one day just to see what we could pull together for him. I think the role originally had been written for a 60-something Italian American, and because of the demands of the role, I guess, or other reasons, they didn’t find somebody of that casting, so they came to me. We had to amend what sort of a cop this guy had been and what his background was. We took particular inspiration from ‘I Think You Should Leave,’ the slicked-back hair. That seemed to make us laugh. So that definitely stayed in from that.”
Melissa Barrera as Joey in Abigail, directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin & Tyler Gillett.
Immediately distrustful of Frank, a sentiment he reciprocates, is Joey, played by Scream veteran Melissa Barrera. She recounts Joey’s role within the group, “Her specialty and the reason that she’s here actually is because she’s a medic. That’s what her profession is, and she’s here basically to knock the victim, whoever they’re kidnapping, she’s supposed to inject them with a sedative and then make sure that they survive and take care of them. She has an extra sedative in case they need it. That’s her job; she’s the caretaker and the nurse, basically, of the group. But of course, being in the army, she has some skills with weapons and she has some combat training, so we get to see a little bit of that. Not a lot, but I did learn how to properly hold a gun and where the finger’s supposed to be.”
Barrera also gave her character a real name, beyond the moniker Joey, worthy of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
The actor tells us, “I actually gave her her real name because these characters, the names that you see in the trailer are their ‘names’ that they’re given there because they share their real names, because it’s for safety reasons in case anyone gets caught, they’re given the rat pack names. So, funny story: originally my character’s rat pack name was Sammy, and because of Sam in Scream, they changed it to Joey. I ended up being Joey and Kathryn ended up being Sammy, but I worked with Matt and Tyler to give her a real name, which is Ana Lucia Cruz, and I wanted it to be a reference to Dracula. So Lucy, I named her Ana Lucia, and Cruz as in cross, something that would kill a vampire, that protects you from the vampire. So that ended up being her name.”
(from left) Abigail (Alisha Weir) and Peter (Kevin Durand) in Abigail, directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin & Tyler Gillett.
Kevin Durand may look imposing in stature, but it quickly becomes clear that his character has a softer side.
“I play a guy named Peter who is basically a hired muscle for the group,” the Canadian actor shares. “We’ve been hired to kidnap a target, and you realize that the target’s a 12-year-old, and we’re like, okay, this is too easy. We realize that it’s not as easy as we thought. Peter’s always a couple of steps behind, partially because it’s a bit of a language barrier. I’m playing him like he’s from French Canada, who’s a little bit of a skew and trying to catch up. He is not really okay with his line of work, so he drinks heavily.”
The group dynamics will play a vital role in Abigail, with the strangers reluctant to trust each other. That’s less so with Peter, who Durand reveals will quickly develop a bond with another team member.
“Well, to a certain degree, some of us look out for each other; some of us don’t give a shit,” Durand explains. “Peter really takes a liking to Sammy, played by the amazing Kathryn Newton. So, they have a pretty cool connection, kind of like a brotherly, sibling-type thing. I mean, they don’t know each other.”
The trailer highlights that some characters quickly embrace the vampiric nature of their captive. That’s less so with Peter.
Durand comments, “How does Peter react when things get weird? He doesn’t want to believe it. He’s very Catholic and the idea that vampires actually exist, he’s like, ‘There’s no such thing.’ He doesn’t believe it and then he’s being attacked by the one.”
It’s easy to see why Peter takes a liking to Sammy. Newton brings a vivacious energy to her heavily tattooed hacker character.
(from left) Abigail (Alisha Weir) and Sammy (Kathryn Newton) in Abigail, directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin & Tyler Gillett.
Newton says of Sammy, “She’s really kind of privileged and naïve to the stakes that she’s put herself in because I think she comes from a background of nothing really bad happens to her. It might even be created in her head if something’s bad. This is a real shock. But I would argue that she’s the nicest person in the movie. I think that she’s got the best intentions; she is not here to really make any money or care about kidnapping anybody. She’s kind of here just to have a good time.”
Angus Cloud’s Dean serves as the group’s wheelman. The “Euphoria” actor brought an unflappable cool factor to the scene observed as he, along with his new colleagues, handed over their phones. Abigail marks one of his final screen appearances.
The crew’s shooter, Rickles, is played by William Catlett. Catlett walks us through his no-nonsense character, “He’s the one that kind of keeps everything grounded in the film. It’s like a heist film. Then it turns into a horror film. We were just doing EPK where we were up in my bungalow because, just like a slapper, you want to be above so you can see everything until everything goes to shit. But that’s pretty much Rickles.”
Catlett also reinforces that this assembled criminal team is working together for the first time on this kidnapping heist.
“We all just met up, but we were all summoned here by Abigail,” Catlett says. “We’d done something that brought us here. Whatever we did, it’s like payback. We were all supposed to be in this place. We think we’re coming together for one thing, but we were handpicked to be here.”
As for the eponymous vampire child and the vampiric horror? Stay tuned for more on Abigail very soon.
In a world where over-polished corporate products dominate the media landscape while the ever-growing threat of AI-generated “art” haunts the horizon, I can’t help but remember a story about how Wes Anderson insisted on using real fur on the stop-motion puppets of his animated opus, Fantastic Mr. Fox. When the animators complained that using fur would result in obvious thumbprints and erratic hair movement that would ruin the “illusion” of lifelike movement, the filmmaker explained that these imperfections were the point.
Why am I bringing this up on a horror website? Well, I’ve always been of the opinion that low production value is simply part of the appeal of independent cinema, and nowhere is this more evident than in the horror genre. Rubber monster suits and watery blood effects are a big part of what make even the cheapest scary movies so endearing, and horror fans are uniquely predisposed to look beyond technical limitations in order to appreciate a good story.
One of my favorite examples of this is a certain micro-budget duology that kicked off one of the scariest film series of all time despite some undeniably janky presentation. And as a lifelong fan of low-budget scares, I’d like to invite you to join me down a J-Horror rabbit hole as we explore the criminally underrated origins of the Ju-On/The Grudge franchise.
While most of you are likely already familiar with 2002’s Ju-On: The Grudge, the film that helped to kick off the J-Horror craze and established Takashi Shimizu as a master of the craft, a lot of folks don’t realize that this was actually the filmmaker’s third attempt at telling the Saeki family story. In fact, the very first appearance of Kayako and her ghostly son occurred in a couple of 1998 short films made by Shimizu while he was still in film school.
Part of a made-for-TV anthology showcasing the work of up-and-coming Japanese filmmakers (Gakkô no Kaidan G), the shorts attempted to update classic Japanese folk tales for a new generation by incorporating modern elements like helpless high-schoolers and cellphones into old-fashioned ghost stories.
The original Toshio!
Despite some cheap camerawork and drama class make-up effects, Shimizu’s Katasumi and 4444444444 (so titled because the Japanese pronunciation of the number 4 is similar to that of death) were the clear highlights of the spooky collection despite being much shorter than the other segments. That’s why it was only natural that the director’s next project would be a feature-length expansion of these ideas produced for the direct-to-video market.
Coming up with an extensive mythology surrounding his murderous ghosts and realizing that he had a potential hit on his hands, Shimizu ended up making the risky decision to split his original two-hour story into two smaller films shot back-to-back. And while the sequel would suffer from this decision, the focus on serialized storytelling is what would ultimately turn this indie experiment into a global phenomenon.
Released in 2000, the first entry in this duology, simply titled Ju-On: The Curse, weaves an interconnected web of paranormal incidents surrounding a cursed house and the ill-fated families that inhabit it. While the film would actually reference the events of Shimizu’s shorts, it’s here that audiences were first introduced to the iconic opening text explaining how a violent death may spawn an infectious curse that self-perpetuates by causing even more deaths in a never-ending cycle of violence.
At first glance, The Curse feels a lot like an anthology meant to repurpose Shimizu’s existing ideas for ghostly short films into a feature format, but narrative details eventually add up as worried teachers, unsuspecting teenagers and psychic realtors unravel bits and pieces of the Saeki family history in a tragic tapestry of death. Curiously, this attempt at crafting a complex narrative puzzle would become a staple of the franchise as future entries (and even the video game) used non-linear storytelling to breathe new life into familiar yarns.
Of course, it’s really the scares that put this franchise on the map, and that’s why you’ll find plenty of expertly orchestrated frights here. Sure, the pale makeup effects and stock sound design aren’t that much better than what we saw in Gakkô no Kaidan G, but the suspenseful execution of moments like Toshio’s slow undead reveal and Kayako’s first contortionist crawl down the stairs – not to mention the incredibly disturbing sequence with a baby inside of a trash bag – are the stuff of horror legend regardless of budget.
I’d even argue that the low production value actually adds to the experience by making everything feel that much more down to earth. The Saeki house isn’t a stylish haunted manor from the Vincent Price era, it’s just a regular Japanese home inhabited by regular people, making it easier to believe that this modern urban legend could also happen to you. Hell, I even think Toshio is scarier when he can pass as a living kid even if the screaming cat effects aren’t as good as the sequels.
Cheap can still be scary.
Unfortunately, quality scares can’t solve everything, and that’s where Ju-On: The Curse 2 comes in. Released the same year as its predecessor, this bizarre sequel only features about 45 minutes of new footage, with the rest being recycled segments from the first film meant to pad out the runtime. While this is a surprisingly dishonest move on Shimizu’s part, with the decision likely resulting in confused viewers thinking that there was something wrong with their rented videotapes, it’s still pretty hard to call this a bad movie.
That’s why I’ve come to respect the flick as a rare instance of a cinematic expansion pack, as the first film didn’t really need to be any longer, but the new segments still do a great job of adding to the existing mythology. This time around, we learn that you don’t even have to come into direct contact with the haunted house in order to be affected by the curse, with characters only tangentially connected to the Saeki tragedy still meeting terrible fates.
That final shot featuring multiple Kayakos is also one of the most incredibly chilling moments in the entire franchise, with the amount of care put into these scenes suggesting that this was probably all meant to have been included in the first film before Shimizu decided otherwise. Either way, I’d still recommend watching this one immediately after Part I in a condensed double-feature – so long as you skip the first thirty minutes.
Despite their humble origins, these low-budget scare-fests would go on to inspire a ghostly media empire, with Shimizu eventually being given the chance to bring his creations to the big screen with one of the best J-Horror flicks of all time. And while I won’t argue that these direct-to-video precursors are necessarily better than 2002’s Ju-On: The Grudge (or even the American duology which was also helmed by Shimizu), I still think that something special was lost each time the series was tasked with pleasing a wider audience, as the story slowly became glossier and less real.
That’s why I’d urge hardcore horror fans to seek out Shimizu’s early experiments, as his creative fingerprints are the duct-tape that keeps this janky collection of horrific vignettes together. It may not always be pretty, but I’ll take the grimy actors caked in cheap blood and white clown makeup over corporate-approved movie monsters any day of the week.
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