With Abigail, directors Tyler Gillett and Matt Bettinelli-Olpin were prepared to make a fun little horror flick featuring a star-studded cast and some ballerina motifs. You know, to prepare you for 2025’s John Wick spinoff, Ballerina. But it turned out to be a lot bloodier than one would think a vampire flick would be. At least compared to Twilight, anyway.
Gillett revealed that while making the film, there was no such thing as too much blood. He told Collider, “It’s fun… At the end of the day, shooting your actors with a blood cannon, they’re excited for it, as well.” Yes! You read that right: A Blood Cannon. Just picture those Nickelodeon slime canons but with fake blood. We come to this place for magic, after all.
The filmmakers wanted there to be so much blood, you can almost feel it seeping out of the screen. Bettinelli-Olpin joked that they used “all the blood on planet Earth” while filming, much like when Barbie used all the pink paint on Earth. It balances itself out eventually.
Abigail follows Melissa Barrera, Dan Stevens, Angus Cloud, and Kathryn Newton as a group of kidnappers who look after Abigail, the aforementioned ballerina and daughter of a crime boss. Unfortunately, that crime boss happens to be Dracula, and Abigail has an appetite for blood. She would be besties with M3GAN.
The movie is over-the-top, but that’s the point. “For us, the audience can just latch onto something if it’s real, whether they know it’s fake or not , it’s obviously not real blood, but you feel it in the room,” Bettinelli-Olpin explained. “The actors can interact with it. Everything just becomes more alive, and it has that energy to it when you’re doing it for real on set. We came up trying to shoot everything almost doc style — running around, you can shoot up, down, left, right, spin around, go anywhere you want.” This seemed to work for Immaculate, so things are looking good!
Abigail hits theaters on April 19th.
(Via Collider)