The new horror movie Abigail comes from the filmmaking team known as Radio Silence, and it bears some hallmarks of their recent movies: It takes place largely in a locked, ornately decorated home, like their class-warfare thriller Ready or Not, and its characters occasionally spout pop-culture references, like those in the team’s recent pair of Scream sequels. But when Abigail was first announced, it had the temporary title of Dracula’s Daughter, tying it to a nearly 90-year-old Universal Monsters movie – the direct sequel, in fact, to the classic 1931 Dracula. It makes sense that Abigail, a Universal release, nevertheless dropped the title; the new movie is not a remake of the old one, isn’t a direct sequel to any other Dracula movie, and for sticklers, it might even count as a spoiler (though the name “Dracula” is never spoken in the film).
Then again, the trailers are plenty clear in communicating what Abigail is about: A team of shady types, including horror all-stars Melissa Barrera (late of the Scream revival), Kathryn Newton (of Freaky and Lisa Frankenstein), and Dan Stevens (The Guest), are assembled 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 in there with her, and so forth. Acrobatic mayhem ensues.
Like Ready or Not – a lot like it, really – Abigail is antic and gory fun, with a core idea that nags at you, because it isn’t 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’s been a little girl a very long time, locked into a stunted girlishness like Kirsten Dunst’s character from Interview with the Vampire. She’s toying with her kidnappers in part, in turns out, as a remedy for her boredom, and perhaps for a bit of extra attention, and you wonder how long this proto-teenaged phase of acting out has been going on: Decades? More? Hovering around twelve forever can’t be god for the psyche, and for brief moments in between blood-splat gags and attempted stakings, Weir and the filmmakers tap into a genuine sadness beneath the monster that itself lies beneath the sweet-little-kid exterior. Abigail may not be a remake of Dracula’s Daughter, but its frustrated female agency – both in-character and as a fun but limited horror picture – very much recalls the monster women of Universal’s past.
Dracula’s Daughter paints a more openly conflicted portrait of vampiric spawn, at least at first. Though it trailed the Tod Browning Dracula by five years, it opens in its immediate aftermath, as Van Helsing (Edward Van Sloan) is suspected of murder for the bodies left in Dracula’s wake. The movie also retcons an unexplained grown daughter of Dracula, Countess Marya Zaleska (Glorida Holden), who steals Dracula’s corpse in hopes that destroying it will free her of her blood-lusting curse. When this fails, she more or less gives up and returns to her vampiring ways, and seeks a companion to turn into a fellow vampire.
Though she has her eyes on Dr. Garth (Otto Kruger), she happens to go about this by menacing a series of women, giving the movie both an undercurrent of sadness and a provocative subtext. Countess Zaleska doesn’t particularly relish her role as a creature of the night (though she does take to it with great style), and the fact that she spends so much time menacing women, eventually kidnapping Dr. Garth’s secretary to lure him to her, feels like an expression of desires that remain taboo even for a vampire. The movie’s homoeroticism also has undertones of stereotyping, with Zaleska coded as a glamorously predatory lesbian. Abigail makes no suggestion of sexuality for its centuries-old antiheroine, but the way she both relishes her vampiric skills and laments the restraints it places on her is the movie’s strongest connection to its purported inspiration.
Dracula’s Daughter isn’t the only distaff Universal Monster, however. Bride of Frankenstein is the most famous, of course – the one that’s actually a pantheon-level monster picture, arguably superior to its predecessor in gothic atmosphere, shocks, and dark humor, though the Bride herself is a climactic revelation, rather than a lead character. As the various Universal sub-series went on, there were other lady-centric variations, though they often stopped short of full Dracula’s Daughter-style leading-monster status. The Invisible Woman deftly sidesteps into comedy, a delightful genre variation that also feels vaguely protective, not wanting invisibility to drive a woman mad the way it immediately does her male predecessor. She-Wolf of London, too, ultimately shields its lead characters from true monster status. The film isn’t directly related to other Wolf Man movies of its era, but it plays on their reputation as a young woman becomes increasingly convinced that she’s subject to a family curse of lycanthropy. (Spoiler warning: It’s more a poor woman’s version of Gaslight than a feminist Wolf Man.) Ultimately, wolf attacks are secondary to the uneasy, eventually maddening suspicion that underneath a polite and ladylike exterior lurks an uncontrollable beast.
One of the most evocative lady-monster moments in the Universal Monsters cycle comes during The Mummy’s Curse, an otherwise fairly rote entry. When Ananka (Virginia Christine), the mummy princess, is raised from her latest slumber, she emerges from a drying swamp, caked in mud. In a terrific three-a-aa-half-minute sequence, the camera follows her as she slowly rises to her feet and slowly becomes reacclimated to her body, the sun beating down on her, until she eventually staggers to a pond and washes away the dirt. (When she’s finally shown in her human form, she’s gorgeous, with a stylish haircut; the true dark mummy magic is pulling off bangs.) She remains hazy on her Egyptian origins throughout much of the film, making her a disappointingly passive figure – but as with the female variations on Dracula and the Wolf Man, her monster-adjacent status allows the movie to address that passivity more directly than it can with its human women providing fodder for capturing or kissing.
In that sense, Abigail establishes the current wave of unofficial Universal Monsters movies – it’s the third Dracula-related Universal movie of the past twelve months – as heirs to the sometimes scattershot programmers that followed up the early classics. (Its cast of horror ringers, and their ability to swap roles across and sometimes even within movies, from final girl to antagonist to comic relief, feels like a contemporary version of recruiting Lon Chaney, Boris Karloff, and/or Bela Lugosi.) That explains both Abigail’s kicky B-movie fun and the nagging sense that it could have been something a little more cleverly evocative. Dracula’s daughter, whether a direct or spiritual descendant, is bound to have some daddy issues, and the Radio Silence team seems to understand this on some level, tying into another character’s anxiety about parental neglect. But like so many of its predecessors, the movie is a little too antsy to give the audience a good time – and like many of the old Universal Monster movies, it does. There are times, though, when the movie’s easy laughs and grinning bursts of gore seem to be coming at Abigail’s expense. Not by making her the butt of jokes, exactly, but by shrugging off a whole lot of monstrous pain in favor of monster-movie pleasure.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.
