The new horror film Abigail comes from the directing team known as Radio Silence, and it bears some hallmarks of their recent films: it takes place largely in a locked, ornately decorated house, like their class war thriller. Ready or Notand its characters sometimes spout pop culture references, like those in the recent pair of Shout suites. But when Abigail was first announced, he had the temporary title of Dracula’s Daughtertying it to a nearly 90-year-old Universal Monsters film – the direct sequel, in fact, to the 1931 classic. Dracula. It is logical that Abigail, a universal version, nevertheless dropped the title; the new film is not a remake of the old one, is not a direct sequel to another Dracula film, and for the stubborn, it might even count as a spoiler (although the name “Dracula” doesn’t is never spoken in the film).
Again, the trailers communicate very clearly what Abigail concerns: A crew of shady types, including horror stars Melissa Barrera (late Shout renaissance), Kathryn Newton (from Weird And Lisa Frankenstein) and Dan Stevens (The guest), are gathered anonymously to kidnap a little girl named Abigail (Alisha Weir) and hold her for a hefty ransom. It turns out that this sweet little ballerina is actually a bloodthirsty vampire; she’s not trapped there with them, they’re trapped there with her, and so on. Acrobatic mayhem ensues.
As Ready or Not – I really like it, really – Abigail is a fun, gory game, with a central idea that nags at you because it’s not quite exploited to its fullest. At one point, Abigail mocks her captors by pointing out that she has “a few centuries of experience” on them; she has been a little girl for a very long time, trapped inside a stunted little girl like Kirsten Dunst’s character in Interview with the Vampire. She plays with her captors in part, ultimately, to cure her boredom, and perhaps for a little extra attention, and you wonder how long this proto-acting out phase has been going on for adolescent: decades? More? Revolving around twelve hours forever can’t be a god to the psyche, and for brief moments between gory gags and attempts at staking, Weir and the filmmakers tap into a real sadness beneath the monster itself beneath the exterior of an adorable little child. . Abigail maybe it’s not a remake of Dracula’s Daughterbut its frustrated female agency – both in character and as a fun but limited horror picture – is very reminiscent of the female monsters of Universal’s past.
Dracula’s Daughter paints a more overtly confrontational portrait of the vampire race, at least at first. Even if he followed Tod Browning Dracula After five years, it opens immediately after, with Van Helsing (Edward Van Sloan) under suspicion of murder for the bodies left in Dracula’s wake. The film also returns to an unexplained adult daughter of Dracula, Countess Marya Zaleska (Glorida Holden), who steals Dracula’s corpse in the hope that its destruction will free her from his bloodthirsty curse. When that fails, she more or less gives up and returns to her vampiric ways and seeks a mate to transform into another vampire.
Although she has her eyes set on Dr. Garth (Otto Kruger), she goes about it by threatening a series of women, giving the film both an undercurrent of sadness and a provocative subtext. Countess Zaleska doesn’t particularly enjoy her role as a creature of the night (although she handles it with great style) and the fact that she spends so much time threatening women, eventually kidnapping Dr. Garth’s secretary to attract him to her. , resembles the expression of desires that remain taboo even for a vampire. The film’s homoeroticism also has undertones of stereotypes, with Zaleska coded as a glamorous, predatory lesbian. Abigail makes no suggestions of sexuality for its centuries-old antiheroine, but the way she both appreciates his vampiric talents and laments the constraints he places on her is the film’s strongest connection to its supposed inspiration.
Dracula’s Daughter is not, however, the only universal distaff monster. Bride of Frankenstein is the most famous, of course – the one that is actually a pantheon-level monster picture, arguably superior to its predecessor in terms of gothic atmosphere, shocks and dark humor, although the bride herself is a climactic revelation rather than a main character. As the various Universal subseries progressed, there were other female-centric variations, although they often stopped short of reaching completeness. Dracula’s Daughter-Style leader monster status. The invisible woman deftly launches into comedy, a delightful genre variation that also seems vaguely protective, not wanting invisibility to drive a woman crazy the way it immediately does with her male predecessor. Wolf of London, also, ultimately protects its main characters from true monster status. The film is not directly related to the others werewolf films of its era, but it plays on their reputation as a young woman becomes increasingly convinced that she is subject to a family curse of lycanthropy. (Spoiler warning: This is more of a poor woman’s version of Gas lamp than a feminist werewolf.) Ultimately, wolf attacks are secondary to the uneasy, even maddening, suspicion that beneath a polite, genteel exterior lies an uncontrollable beast.
One of the most evocative lady-monster moments of the Universal Monsters cycle occurs during The mummy’s curse, an otherwise fairly routine entry. When Ananka (Virginia Christine), the mummy princess, wakes from her final sleep, she emerges from a dried-up swamp, covered in mud. In a terrific three-and-a-half minute sequence, the camera follows her as she slowly gets up and gets used to her body, the sun beating down on her, until she eventually staggers to a pond and washes. Dirtiness. (When she is finally shown in human form, she is stunning, with a stylish haircut; the mummy’s real black magic involves removing bangs.) She remains unclear about her Egyptian origins for much of the film, which makes her a disappointingly passive figure – but as with the female variations of Dracula and the Wolfman, her monster-adjacent status allows the film to address this passivity more directly than it can with its women humans providing fodder to capture or kiss.
In this direction, Abigail establishes the current wave of unofficial Universal Monsters films – this is the third Dracula-related Universal film in the last twelve months – as heirs to the sometimes scattered programmers who followed the early classics. (His cast of horror characters and their ability to swap roles across and sometimes even within the films, from final girl to antagonist to comic relief, resembles a contemporary version of Lon Chaney’s recruitment , Boris Karloff and/or Bela Lugosi.) This explains both AbigailIt’s the fun of the B-movie and the nagging feeling that this could have been something a little more cleverly evocative. Dracula’s daughter, whether a direct or spiritual descendant, is bound to have daddy issues, and the Radio Silence team seems to understand this on some level, relating to another character’s anxiety regarding the parental neglect. But like many of its predecessors, the film is a little too edgy to give audiences a good time – and like many of the old Universal Monster films, it does. There are times, however, where the film’s easy laughs and bursts of smiling blood seem to come at Abigail’s expense. Not by making her the butt of jokes, exactly, but by ignoring a lot of monstrous pain in favor of monster movie fun.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He is a regular contributor to The AV Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He also broadcasts podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com.
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