Posted in: Movies, Universal | Tagged: abigail, radio silence

Abigail: Character Designed To Feel Like "A Cool Halloween Costume"

When designing the bloody ballerina, Abigail, the people behind the camera, wanted a look that would make a cool Halloween costume.

Abigail kind of came out of nowhere. We knew there was a Universal Monster movie on the slate, but everyone was surprised to see that it wasn't anything we'd seen before. Dracula's daughter gets kidnapped and rips through the people who decide that kidnapping her is a good idea. It jumped to the top of many people's lists just from the concept and the first trailer alone, not to mention the very impressive cast. That concept and the scenes of a little ballerina covered in blood were very much what the people involved in the film were going for. Co-director Tyler Gillett explained to Empire that they wanted something that would make a fantastic Halloween costume later this year.

"It just felt like, 'This is the iconic feel of the movie,'" Gillett said. "The imagery is this young girl, in a tutu, covered in blood because she's been on a killing spree. … Our goal is always to find and design a character that feels like, 'Ooh, fuck, that's gonna be a cool Halloween costume.'"

It turns out that the little ballerina herself is actually known for musicals, specifically Matilda the Musical, and when you have someone who can do Broadway-style singing and dancing, you lean into that. Specifically, when Alisha Weir was cast, the dancing aspect of the film became much more important as co-director Matt Bettinelli-Olpin explained, "In the opening scene, she was at a ballet class, and it was kind of a part of the character. But once we met Alisha, she was like, 'I'm really good at dancing,' and it became, 'Ooh, let's steer into that. Let's make that part of the identity of the movie.'" We see Weir and her using dancing and violence in the same way we saw M3GAN go insanely viral in 2022. Everything about this film just looks like everyone involved wanted to have fun with an insane-sounding concept, and we love that.

Abigail: Summary, Cast List, Release Date

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), William Catlett (Black Lightning, True Story), Kevin Durand (Resident Evil: Retribution, X-Men Origins: Wolverine) and Angus Cloud (Euphoria, North Hollywood) as the kidnappers and Alisha Weir (Roald Dahl's Matilda the Musical, Darklands) as Abigail.

The film is produced by William Sherak (Scream franchise, Ready or Not), Paul Neinstein (Scream franchise; executive producer, The Night Agent), and James Vanderbilt (Zodiac, Scream franchise) for Project X Entertainment, by Tripp Vinson (Ready or Not, Journey 2: The Mysterious Island) and by Radio Silence's Chad Vilella (executive producer Ready or Not and Scream franchise). The executive producers are Ron Lynch and Macdara Kelleher. Abigail will be released in theaters on April 19th.

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