[COLUMN] Abigail Would Be a Much Better Movie If We Hadn't Seen Its Trailer | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Note: This article discusses the premise of the movie Abigail, but nothing more than what is revealed in the trailer. Which is probably too much.

The trailer for Abigail is a minor work of art unto itself.

The teaser sets up a fairly straightforward premise. A collection of criminals have been hired by a mysterious middle-man (Giancarlo Esposito) to kidnap a young ballerina, the eponymous Abigail (Alisha Weir), in the hopes of ransoming her to her father. However, things quickly begin to go awry in the creepy old mansion that the gang has set up as their headquarters. It quickly becomes clear that Abigail is not what she appears to be, suddenly bearing fangs and leaping through the air.

“We kidnapped a vampire!” gasps Joey (Melissa Barrera), the movie’s lead character. Standing beside her, it is left to Sammy (Kathryn Newton) to put the icing on the proverbial cake by spelling out the inherent absurdity of the premise: “A vampire ballerina!” It’s a sharp genre swerve in the trailer, one that is breathtaking in its audacity. It sets up one premise only to deliver something that feels completely different. It’s a great trailer to watch with a crowd.

However, it also feels like a trailer that succeeds at the expense of the movie itself. It sells Abigail as “the vampire ballerina movie”, which does a disservice to a movie that spends an inordinate amount of time building to the reveal that it is, in fact, a vampire ballerina movie. The movie is structured in such a way that the twist about Abigail’s true nature is supposed to catch the audience off-guard, challenging their assumptions about the kind of movie that they are watching.

Of course, Abigail originated and was developed as a vampire movie. It is part of the latest attempt by Universal Pictures to capitalize on their classic movie monsters in inventive and playful ways, like Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man. The film was originally titled Dracula’s Daughter, taking the title and premise from the 1936 sequel to Tod Browning’s classic Dracula. However, the rebranding of the movie as Abigail makes it clear that film’s innovation is hiding that relationship to that horror icon.

This is obvious in how the movie sets up its twist. The opening act of the movie spends a lot of time focusing on the organized crime nature of the plot. The reveals come as a sort of nesting doll. First, it’s revealed that Abigail is the daughter of a notorious crime lord. Then, it’s revealed that the notorious crime lord has a horrific enforcer known for tearing the criminal empire’s enemies limb from limb. There is a sense, in that opening act, of the water gradually reaching boiling point.

While the movie includes various elements that point towards the idea that Abigail is a vampire, such as a host of old-fashioned imagery of a child who looks a lot like the title character, it also throws in a variety of red herrings. When Joey forges a relationship with the captive Abigail, Abigail begins to sow seeds of doubt about the rest of the gang. Abigail claims that the mysterious Frank (Dan Stevens), who has appointed himself leader of the group, is her father’s brutal assassin.

Indeed, Abigail maintains this level of mystery past its first kill. Early in the movie, the driver Dean (Angus Cloud) is brutally dispatched. While there are allusions to Dracula in Dean’s death scene, such as the presence of rats in the build-up to the violence, the particulars of the attack don’t scream “vampire ballerina.” They don’t even particularly implicate Abigail. When Sammy finds Dean, he is decapitated rather than desanguinated.

It’s impossible to prove a counterfactual, just as it is impossible for somebody who saw Abigail after watching the trailer to know what it would be like to experience the film blind, but there is something deflating about how this plays to an audience that already knows the twist ahead of time. There’s a real sense of “when are they going to get to the fireworks factory?” to Abigail, to the point that the reveal scene arrives as a relief rather than as a jolt of energy.

To be fair, it’s hard to blame the Abigail marketing team for foregrounding the movie’s twist in the publicity material. It is an insanely competitive market place out there, and even low-budget horror movies need some sort of hook to help lure in audience members. Abigail is distributed by Universal Pictures, which understands how this works. Last year, the studio was responsible for overseeing the release of pre-packaged viral hits like M3GAN and Cocaine Bear.

It probably would have been next-to-impossible to sell theatre-going audiences on what seemed like a fairly generic kidnap thriller, even if the advertising hinted at some sort of supernatural twist. Indeed, it seems like the full-on marketing campaign also struggled to win over viewers. Abigail had a bumpy weekend at the box office, coming in below expectations and behind Alex Garland’s Civil War in its second weekend. The big swing in publicity was understandable, even if it didn’t quite work.

Indeed, this is just how movies are sold these days. Many trailers, particularly for bigger movies, feel like they present the movie in miniature. Some even adopt the three-act structure to laying out the movie’s story for their audience. Fans might complain about “spoilers” in reviews or commentary, but the truth is that the marketing tends to foreground them. Patrick Stewart’s cameo in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness was announced by the official marketing.

There are a couple of reasons why modern movies adopt this approach. The most obvious is the importance of the opening weekend. In the old days, it was possible for a movie to open relatively weak and then gain traction through word of mouth and become a viral hit. That still happens, on occasion, as with The Greatest Showman or Elemental. However, for most movies, the opening weekend is do-or-die. The industry moves so quickly that there’s little opportunity to recover.

As a result, the impulse is to give the release the biggest push possible, to sell everything to the audience. In such a climate, holding anything back is equivalent to fighting with one hand tied behind the movie’s back. Anything that could potentially attract any viewer needs to be placed front-and-center. As nice as it might be to preserve some element of surprise for the viewer, the real priority is to get bums in seats. These days, movies only get one shot.

While there’s undoubtedly something edifying in watching a horror movie like The Empty Man grow a genuine cult audience in real time, the collapse of secondary markets like home media, television packages and even streaming licensing make it very hard to turn a profit on a cult movie that comes by its cult status honestly. The Empty Man might have earned the respect of horror movie aficionados, but from the studio’s perspective it earned less than $5m.

That said, audiences share some responsibility for this shift. The rise of online film commentary has made it increasingly easy for audiences to complain when they feel like they have received something different from what they expected. As much as online commenters might complain about not wanting to be spoiled, there’s ample evidence that they don’t want to be meaningfully surprised. Audiences will complain when they get something different than what they expected.

As such, putting the “vampire ballerina” twist in the trailer is a way of insulating Abigail against such a potential backlash from viewers who showed up expecting a paint-by-numbers kidnapping thriller only for the movie to take a very sharp left turn into monster movie territory. This may be particularly true of horror movie fans, who have been known to react particularly strongly against movies that play with their expectations.

However, there are examples of movies that succeeded while preserving these sorts of twists. Quentin Tarantino has talked about how everybody now knows that Damien (Harvey Spencer Stephens) from The Omen is the Antichrist, but the original marketing campaign concealed that fact. Watching the movie with the benefit of hindsight, this makes sense. Much of The Omen is structured as a mystery about Robert Thorn (Gregory Peck) uncovering the nature of Damien’s secret.

Similarly, Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game is built around one of the great twists in cinema. However, the movie was able to sell itself on the promise of a twist while swearing viewers to secrecy about the nature of that twist, helping to make audiences “feel like part of a club.” As Michael Sauter explained in a retrospectively looking back at the film’s success, “The studio’s ad campaign played up the movie’s pivotal plot revelation, while urging audiences not to reveal it.”

The approach worked. Indeed, the film was able to preserve a fairly seismic twist concerning the identity of one of its stars right up until that performer received an Oscar nomination for their work on the film. The Crying Game earned more than $62m on a budget of “just over £2m.” It did this by becoming a genuine word-of-mouth hit, something buzzy and exciting for audiences to discover on their own terms.

In the modern digital age, there’s a reluctance to let such things develop organically. Everything comes pre-packaged and pre-digested for the audience. The publicity team for Abigail worked hard to ensure that there was a veritable mood board of reaction gifs available on social media from the moment of the film’s release. Abigail arrived pre-memed, particularly compared to competition like Alex Garland’s Civil War.

In some ways, Abigail is a victim of a shifting industry. Concealing the twist might have been hard on the modern internet, and could even have provoked outrage from audiences who felt wrongfooted by the movie’s premise. Even if the film successfully built an organic “you gotta see this!” buzz, it wouldn’t have happened immediately. The film would likely have left cinemas by the time that such enthusiasm reached critical mass, and couldn’t count on home media to earn its money back.

It’s a shame, because Abigail is a fairly solid B-movie. It’s a little over-long, particularly in its opening and closing acts. It’s very clumsy in parceling out exposition, tending to give its leads monologues in which they spell out character backstory and motivation for the ensemble. However, it has a game cast and it commits to its pulpiness. It’s a movie that plays well to a game crowd, and where one can imagine the electricity in a room that saw the movie completely unprepared.

That said, the great trick of Abigail – “a vampire ballerina!” – is something that the movie can only pull once. Like the eponymous vampire, trapped for eternity in a child’s body, Abigail bloomed a little too early.