I left my screening of Abigail considering the different types of horror films and their marketing. This review will contain spoilers for the film but nothing outside of the trailer and its relation to the contents of the first act (I don’t want to reveal all the film’s mysteries/twists) because that was at the crux of my ponderings. I don’t think, and please correct me if I’m wrong, there was a single trailer for the film that did not reveal that Abigail was a vampire. This means for the entire first act, as the rest of the characters don’t realize who/what is killing the rest of their team, any audience member who saw the trailer knows. We are ahead of the characters. Not a conventional choice but something that happens from time to time depending on the premise. Ready or Not (which shares directors for Abigail Tyler Gillett and Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and a screenwriter in Guy Busick. Stephen Shields, who also wrote Abigail did not write Ready or Not) also did this, but I found it worked better there for one reason. In that, Grace (played by Samara Weaving) is the only character who doesn’t know what’s going on initially but quickly catches on that hide and seek is not fun and games.
In Abigail, the crew of strangers pull off the kidnapping with the edict that they just have to hold her for a day, then they will get a lot of money. The one given the name Joey (played by Melissa Barrera) is the only one who is supposed to talk to Abigail (played by Alisha Weir), the vampire hiding amongst them. She’s set up to be a character that is extremely good at reading people and their tells, but the audience (if they saw the trailer) is well ahead of her on Abigail’s deception throughout the first act. Now you can add that Abigail is supposed a centuries-old vampire, which means we are supposed to believe she is gifted at masking her tells (and she was using enough truth that this is a viable explanation). This might be a hard explanation to swallow. But I think the biggest problem in all this comes down to simply, audiences don’t like to be ahead of characters for too long. We would have liked for them to have realized the rouse earlier – gotten to the ballerina vampire of it all faster, because from there we are all on the journey together.
And the thing is, looked at independently, I think the set-up was good. However, because of the marketing, which was effective marketing to build interest in the film, and I’m not entirely sure of a better way to market the film that would have shown the fun of it than leaning into the ballerina vampire, I think it hurt the set-up and how we perceived characters because of it. I try as much as possible to go into movies blind, which is easier with festival movies than theatrical releases because I know trailers, word-of-mouth, etc. can impact how we go into a movie and the reaction we come out of it. I thought Bombshell had one of the best trailers of 2019, but for me, the movie did not live up to the short film in that trailer. With the 45th anniversary screenings of Alien this past week in theaters, a friend reminded me that, of course, we know now that Ripley is the main character, but original audiences did not because it started as an ensemble. It was only from word of mouth (and history) that we now know Ripley is the final girl for the film, but watching the film blind, you wouldn’t be able to tell that going in, and Sigourney Weaver was not top billed.
I don’t know if there is a solution for the marketing/story dynamic because while I rather enjoyed Abigail and the performance of the cast, I think it suffered from an audience who was waiting an entire act for a twist they already knew was coming.
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