While we’ve long known Radio Silence was working on the next film in the Universal Monsters revival, and that their Scream leading lady, Melissa Barrera, was starring—the rest was just rumors. Now, we’ve got a title and a trailer that, frankly, appears to give an awful lot away about its vampire kidnapping plot.
Even still, this trailer is awesome. It has some NSFW language, but never has an f-bomb been more required than when crooks are realizing they kidnapped “a fucking vampire… a ballerina vampire.” Step aside, M3GAN; it looks like 2024 has its own tween terror to reckon with.
Here’s the official logline: “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 $US50 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.”
You have to assume there’s more to the movie than what we see in that action-packed trailer—clearly, the kidnapping is a set-up to give Abigail some “food” to play with, no?—and that Abigail’s “powerful underworld figure” father (could it be… Dracula?) will show up eventually. No matter what happens, Abigail looks like a ton of fun, and we’d expect nothing less than a gory good time from Radio Silence (directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, who also made Ready or Not, 2022’s Scream, and 2023’s Scream VI). It’s written by Stephen Shields (The Hole in the Ground, Zombie Bashers) and Guy Busick (Scream franchise, Ready or Not), and as you can see from the trailer has a fantastic cast; aside from Barrera, it stars Dan Stevens, Kathryn Newton, William Catlett, Kevin Durand, and Angus Cloud, as well as Alisha Weir as the blood-sucking ballerina, and Giancarlo Esposito as “guy who organizes the heist but is definitely up to something more sinister.”
Abigail hits theaters April 19, and even before today’s big reveal it was at the very top of our must-see list. Bring on that headless pas de deux!
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