Children can be such monsters.
After a group of would-be criminals kidnap the 12-year-old ballerina daughter of a powerful underworld figure, all they have to do to collect a $50 million ransom is watch the girl overnight. In an isolated mansion, the captors start to dwindle, one by one, and they discover, to their mounting horror, that they’re locked inside with no normal little girl.
From Radio Silence—the directing team of MATT BETTINELLI-OLPIN and TYLER GILLETT behind the terrifying modern horror hits Ready or Not, 2022’s Scream and last year’s Scream VI—comes a brash, blood-thirsty new vision of the vampire flick, written by STEPHEN SHIELDS (The Hole in the Ground, Zombie Bashers) and GUY BUSICK (Scream franchise, Ready or Not).
Abigail stars MELISSA BARRERA (Scream franchise, In the Heights), DAN STEVENS (Gaslit, Legion), KATHRYN NEWTON (Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, Freaky), WILL CATLETT (Black Lightning, True Story), KEVIN DURAND (Resident Evil: Retribution, X-Men Origins: Wolverine) and ANGUS CLOUD (Euphoria, North Hollywood) as the kidnappers. ALISHA WEIR (Roald Dahl’s Matilda the Musical, Darklands) stars as Abigail, and the esteemed cast includes Emmy nominee MATTHEW GOODE (The Crown, Downton Abbey), and five-time Emmy nominee GIANCARLO ESPOSITO (Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul) as Lambert, the efficient organizer of Abigail’s kidnapping.
The film is produced by WILLIAM SHERAK (Scream franchise, Ready or Not), JAMES VANDERBILT (Zodiac, Scream franchise) and PAUL NEINSTEIN (Scream franchise; executive producer, The Night Agent) for Project X Entertainment, by TRIPP VINSON (Ready or Not, Journey 2: The Mysterious Island) for Vinson Films and by Radio Silence’s CHAD VILLELLA (executive producer Ready or Not and Scream franchise). The executive producers are RON LYNCH (Scream VI, 2022’s Scream) and MACDARA KELLEHER (Foundation, Evil Dead Rise).
The director of photography is AARON MORTON nzcs (Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power), the production designer is SUSIE CULLEN (Sexy Beast, Happy Valley) and the costume designer is GWEN JEFFARES (costume supervisor Cocaine Bear, Rig 45). The music is by Emmy nominee BRIAN TYLER (The Super Mario Bros. Movie, Fast X). The editor is MICHAEL P. SHAWVER (Black Panther films, A Quiet Place Part II) and the casting is by RICH DELIA (IT films, The Nun). Universal Pictures presents a Project X Entertainment/Vinson Films/Radio Silence production of a Radio Silence film.
THE BACKSTORY
Since bursting onto the indie film scene with 2012’s found-footage anthology V/H/S, Radio Silence, the moviemaking collective of directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett and producer Chad Villella, have enjoyed massive box-office success with such hits as Ready or Not, Scream and Scream VI. Seamlessly marrying high tension with serious scares and bloody mayhem—along with a healthy dose of black humor—Radio Silence’s films have helped drive renewed interest in the genre, winning over a new generation of horror fans.
The latest addition to their outré oeuvre, Abigail, retains all the hallmarks of their best work while offering an exciting new spin on classic vampire mythology. It begins with a high-stakes heist, a dangerous mission that, if all goes according to plan, could net six strangers a staggering $50 million. Recruited for the job by a mysterious fixer, the team comprises the driver, the sniper, the medic, the muscle, the hacker, and the thin man, aka head of ops. Their real identities are kept secret from each other as a kind of insurance—should one of them be caught, that person would be unable to implicate her or his co-conspirators. Together, they must infiltrate the well-appointed home of a reclusive kingpin who presides over a vast criminal empire. After sedating and abducting his pre-teen ballerina daughter, Abigail, they must safely transport the girl back to a remote mansion, then settle in to wait for the sun to rise and the cash to turn up.
Through a combination of ingenuity and plan dumb luck, the gambit succeeds. But what the kidnappers don’t realize is that their cavernous hideout is, in fact, a petite predator’s playground, and she can’t wait to turn the tables on her assailants and exact violent retribution. “We thought it was such a fun mashing up of different ideas,” says Bettinelli-Olpin. “It feels like a heist movie that’s really intimate and character-driven, and it gets hijacked by a vampire movie. We also thought that that character of Abigail, this little girl who you have a lot of sympathy for in the first half of the movie, when she becomes the villain, there’s hopefully some catharsis in that. You want to see her kick everyone’s ass.”
The ass-kicking, blood-drinking ballerina was initially the brainchild of screenwriter Stephen Shields. An avowed horror fan, Shields won early notice for his screenplay for The Hole in the Ground, a 2019 Sundance Film Festival entry about a mother who becomes frightened and suspicious of her young son after he returns eerily changed following a brief disappearance in the woods behind their rural home.
Shields was perusing the in-flight entertainment options on a flight from Dublin to Los Angeles when he hit upon the notion that would become Abigail. “I was thinking, I haven’t seen a good heist movie in a while,” Shields says. Reflecting on some of his favorite crime films—including Quentin Tarantino’s now-iconic 1992 debut Reservoir Dogs—Shields began mulling concepts for one of his own, and for fun, he decided to introduce a horror movie monster into the mix.
A vampire was a natural choice, as Shields always had had a particular affinity for the fanged fiends in movies including Salem’s Lot, The Lost Boys and Fright Night. “The inspiration for me was just the love of the two genres that I liked watching,” Shields says.
The screenwriter first pitched the heist-meets-horror idea to Universal in 2019, and the studio bought an early draft of the script the following year. Excited by its potential, executives embarked on a search for producing partners who would spark to the screenplay’s unusual marriage of genres and the vicious vamp at its core. Topping the list was William Sherak, whose Project X Entertainment had produced Ready or Not and both of Radio Silence’s Scream films.
Sherak felt that with some key tweaks, Abigail would be something that Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett could really sink their teeth into. He wanted to ensure the kidnappers felt like grounded, fully realized people who just happen to find themselves in a truly inexplicable situation, a hallmark of every Radio Silence production.
“What they’re just great at is allowing the first part of a movie to develop characters where you truly like them, know them and believe them as being real,” Sherak says. “Then when you put them in this extraordinary situation—taking real people with real problems in life and throwing a tween vampire at them—watching that unfold is where we find the fun.”
For the audience, the fun really begins once the kidnappers reach the mansion, dubbed Wilhelm Manor, where they meet their contact, Lambert, who collects their cell phones so that their location cannot be traced. He also christens the team’s members with code names inspired by the Rat Pack, the band of 1950s entertainers that included Joey Bishop, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., Dean Martin, Peter Lawford and Sinatra’s close friend, comedian Don Rickles.
As the twitchy paranoid bunch bickers and banters, their reasons for participating in the heist are slowly revealed, but that does little to resolve their deep (and well-founded) mistrust of one another. It’s only after Abigail abandons her innocent façade that they begin to band together, lest they be dead by dawn.
Working from Shields’s drafts, screenwriter Guy Busick made the changes required for the film to feel like a true Radio Silence production. Having written all three of the team’s biggest hits, Busick was delighted to be reunited with the collective. “Matt, Tyler and Chad are wonderful filmmakers and wonderful human beings,” Busick says. “We have a creative shorthand that makes all our jobs much easier. We share the same sensibility and the same love of quirky, odd movies that really shouldn’t work but somehow do.”
Immediately hooked by the core concept of a crime movie colliding with a monster movie, Busick says he “watched every vampire movie I could think of.” That list included such landmarks as Universal’s 1931 Dracula, directed by Tod Browning and starring Bela Lugosi in the title role, and Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula from 1992, starring Gary Oldman. Tarantino’s 1996 film From Dusk Till Dawn also provided inspiration, shifting as it does from gripping crime thriller to over-the-top vampire romp. “I’ll always remember going into that movie cold and being shocked and completely delighted at that turn,” Busick says.
After brushing up on his vampire lore, Busick, along with the other filmmakers, set out to craft a bold new incarnation of the monster film, one with a fresh and frightening villain unlike any audiences had ever seen.
“Our goal was to make Abigail as strong and specific as possible, then add the monster window dressing,” Busick says. “The producers and Radio Silence and I had a blast figuring out which ‘traditional’ vampire powers and weaknesses she should have. Can she turn into a bat? No, but she can fly. Does garlic affect her? No, but sunlight does. We wanted her to be terrifying, intimidating, and manipulative whether her fangs were out or not.” Adds Gillett: “The aim for us from jump was telling a story in the lineage of our favorite vampire movies but giving it a spin that felt incredibly contemporary.”
Assembling a top-flight ensemble cast for the film, Radio Silence headed to Ireland to shoot Abigail in the late spring and early summer of 2023. During production, it fell to Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett to balance the tension arising from the kidnappers’ personality clashes with the sheer horror that Abigail unleashes on them. Frequently, the directorial duo would gut-check themselves to ensure that Abigail would strike all the right notes in terms of tone; it was especially important to ensure the comedy never overwhelmed the horror.
Their mission, always, was to deliver an unforgettable theatrical experience for genre fans, themselves included. “We always aim to entertain ourselves,” Bettinelli-Olpin says. “We try to make sure that every single scene not only functions on a story level, but also that it pushes the buttons we want to push in terms of entertainment. We want to make sure that it’s always fun, exciting, scary, emotional, so that when you get to the end of it, you have an overwhelming sense of having gone through something fun and exciting and scary and emotional, all in one package.”
Adds Gillett: “It’s really through horror movies that you get to do all those things in one story. There’s just nothing quite like the experience of being in a crowded theater, having a shared catharsis, being scared together, laughing together. What we want is for people to leave having had a great time.”
