Flasz On Film

If you care to google for exactly twelve seconds, you will find a good handful of pointers and hacks telling you what to do with stale bread. Now, admittedly having lived in the UK for the better part of my adult life I don’t get to deploy any such life hacks in anger because for some magical reason bread doesn’t go stale in this country when it’s left for a few days. It becomes a mould colony. However, I did grow up in a corner of the world where it is possible to encounter bread gone stale, so maybe this following piece of advice is for you.  

All you need to do is sprinkle some water on that stale bread and sling it into the oven for a few minutes. Alternatively – and this is something I remember doing – you can wrap stale bread in a damp tea towel and microwave (pronounced as mee-crow-wha-vey, by the way) for a moment. What you will obtain is bread that looks, smells and tastes like it was freshly baked. But the spell you put it under wears off much quicker than you think, as after twenty-to-thirty minutes that refreshed loaf of goodness is going to revert to its old stale self. So, what you must do, if you know what’s good for you, is perform that bread de-staling ritual, consume what you need to consume as soon as possible and move on with your day.  

Now, why am I telling you this? Because I think the same logic applies not only to the simple act of watching Abigail, the newest creation of the filmmaking duo of Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett (who have previously given us Ready or Not, Scream 5 and Scream 6), but predominantly to the subgenre of horror it attempts to bring back, which is the seminal old-as-literature-itself vampire horror. In fact, it is my estimation that Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett  

(pause) 

Seriously, can we come up with a clever name for their duo like that time people decided it was too many syllables to spend on Powell and Pressburger (even though it rolled off the tongue much better than Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett), so they just called them The Archers? I kid, they coined this term themselves, but you catch my drift… Can I just use their initials? Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett? the BOG? Way easier. Please and thank you. 

(unpause) 

have been successful in applying a similar freshening methodology to their other works; though, I have not seen Devil’s Due, so I am open to stand corrected. It is nevertheless inescapable that this duo – the BOG, that is – have looked at the genre of horror and played with stuff other filmmakers have been toying with as well… but with a twist. They took a narrative for an elevated eat-the-rich satire which in other people’s hands would have likely been a bit more serious and politically slanted and they made it fun. They look at the nostalgia sequel trend and they applied it to the Scream franchise with great effect. I don’t know what exactly the recipe is in full – at best I have an idea about a few ingredients which might be in use here – but the net result is that warts and all, the BOG-directed horror movies are almost always fun to look at.  

And Abigail is on exception here either.  

It is honestly rather difficult to freshen up a vampire horror, especially since Bram Stoker’s Dracula is just coming up to one hundred and thirty years old. You can’t honestly try to surprise the viewer in any way because the minute they connect the dots and realize what they are watching relates to the vampire lore, all sorts of connotations come up to the fore. Garlic, wild rose, bats… all of it. And ever since Salem’s Lot and the nascent of 80s vampire revival (on which I shall opine in not-too-distant future, so watch this space), even potentially original or quirky variations on the theme have been filed under “it’s all been done before.” But that’s not a good reason to give up because horror thrives on its repeatability, and you can literally retell the same story a hundred times while coming up with fresh angles and takes; vide all incarnations of Dracula ranging from Murnau’s Nosferatu to Blood for Dracula and even spoofy Dracula: Dead and Loving it or Renfield. It’s not about what the story is about as much as how it sells what it has to sell and what the resultant experience amounts to.  

Therefore, you can kind of infer from the poster alone what Abigail is going to be about. And if you watch the trailer, you’ll have spoiled literally every potential twist in the narrative that could have otherwise come as a surprise… that is if you just woke up from a coma or you’ve never seen a movie or read a book before. The scenario is intimately familiar to anyone vaguely skilled in the art of sitting through a genre movie every now and again as we see a team of mercenaries, among whom we find Melissa Barrera (the BOG stalwart at this point… Where is Samara Weaving these days, I ask…), Dan Stevens and a concoction of sideshow faces like William Catlett, Kevin Durand, and Kathryn Newton, who are tasked (apparently by Giancarlo Esposito who is always nice to look at) with kidnapping a daughter of a mysterious and wealthy individual (that’s the titular Abigail played by Alisha Weir) and then keeping her for ransom at a safe house. What they don’t know is that Abigail is not your regular little girl who’s into ballet and teddy bears, but rather a bloodthirsty vampire. And that this entire job may have been a stich-up. And that someone among them isn’t who they say they are.  

As I said, the recipe is all there and once you factor in the vampire element, you know exactly where the movie will go and that the only thing you can expect at this point is flair in the execution department. Which is where the BOG deliver as they clearly know how to have fun reheating a stale genre, which classical elements to lean on, where to blow things out of all proportion and most importantly how to make you have fun in the process. Therefore, I can only diagnose Abigail as an out-and-out success because the entertainment value extracted from the viewing experience is incredible.  

Let’s be honest, though. It ain’t Wes Craven’s Scream or Fede Alvarez’s Evil Dead remake; and I am fully aware I am setting these titles side by side knowing it might give at least one genre hound a much-anticipated aneurysm. But as far as modern horror goes, it’s damn good fun, appropriately ridiculous, replete with blood and gore and all delivered with a mixture of required self-seriousness and a tongue-in-cheek attitude. 

Therefore, I can’t recommend it enough, just as I can’t recommend enough that life hack about microwaving stale bread because boy does it work. Abigail offers a tasty twist on the vampire lore that equally capitalizes on the canonical archetype and its many well-worn constituent elements as it brings some much-needed freshness to the operation, be it in the form of banter between the leads or even the smallest directorial decisions, such as to make sure that vampires don’t simply die when their hearts are pierced with a wooden stake. They explode in a fountain of blood and viscera covering everything and everyone with a thick layer of what used to be inside them.  

It’s just fun to watch a movie that is as self-aware as it is aware of its requirement to take itself seriously. So, we trot between moments where Abigail disposes of their captors with the grace of a young ballerina, flashes of comedic timing indicating that the characters themselves don’t even pretend that vampires don’t exist and whole set pieces of genuine devotion to the ancient art of raking protagonists through the coals in anticipation of their inner catharsis. All in service of getting the viewer to a state not to dissimilar from the one Melissa Barrera is at the end of it all, where she emerges from the experience covered from head to toe in other people’s blood and lights up a cigarette like the scream queen that she is.  

Fun times. But don’t get any ideas. The fun Abigail supplies has a rather short window of effectiveness, just like that microwaved stale bread. It works in the moment and doesn’t stand to any sustained analysis, scrutiny or further thematic treatment. It’s just a vehicle for a good time. Put ham and cheese on it, shove it in your face. Bob’s your uncle. You have been warned.