Ten Top Horror Films Like Abigail
From earlier Radio Silence films to likeable vampire comedies like The Lost Boys, there are plenty of fantastic horror Movies like Abigail to check out. Under the direction of Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, sometimes known as Radio Silence, Abigail offers a fresh humorous interpretation of the vampire mythography. It centers on a select group of crooks dispatched to kidnap the 12-year-old ballerina daughter of a prominent person in the criminal underworld only to discover she is actually a bloodthirsty, centuries-old vampire. She is trapped in a mansion with them; they are trapped in a mansion with her.
Her Daughter, Dracula
Abigail is a contemporary reinterpretation of the 1936 Universal Monsters classic Daughter, Dracula Gloria Holden plays Countess Marya Zaleska, a fellow vampire and daughter of Count Dracula who wants to live a regular life free from his influence after his death. After failing to lift his curse by sacrificing his body, the Countess turns to psychiatrist Dr. Jeffrey Garth. She kidnaps Janet, Dr. Garth's assistant, and transports her to Transylvania for a dramatic confrontation.
Although Abigail hardly resembles its original inspiration, Dracula's Daughter has the same sense of vampire carnage and the same emphasis on character above horror. Among a sea of samey Dracula adaptations, Dracula's Daughter presents a unique interpretation of the well-known vampire mythology, much as Abigail does. And under all the horror, they both have a playful sense of humor.
Scream (2020)
The directors of Abigail, Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett, first became well-known when they revived the Scream franchise with their 2022 "requel, merely titled Scream." Before Radio Silence arrived, it seemed as though only Wes Craven, the director of the first four films, could oversee a Scream movie. But Radio Silence honored Craven's legacy and brought the property into a new era by adding their own special sensibility to the Scream series.
Scream parodies respectful franchise reboots and poisonous fandoms, so mocking a whole new generation of horror directors and their audience. Like Abigail, the first Scream film from Radio Silence finds the ideal mix between ridiculous slapstick humor and graphic horror violence. It brilliantly combines the two genres since the scares never take away from the laughs and the laughs never take away from the scares; they rather enhance one another.
Children's Of the Corn
Part of Abigail's genre fun is seeing an apparently innocent little child—or, at least, someone who looks like a child—easily killing a lot of grownups. Children of the Corn, Fritz Kiersch's film adaptation of the Stephen King short story with same name, is the mother of all killer kid Movies. Children of the Corn is set in the fictional rural town of Gatlin, Nebraska, where every child has been inspired by an unidentified entity to perform ritualistic murder of every adult.
Driving across the nation, young couple Vicky and Burt come upon the town and run afoul of the murderous children. With a traditional plot and a boatload of blood-soaked violence, Children of the Corn performs as a more or less standard slasher. Like Abigail, the young children committing the murder also give a fresh interpretation of that formula.
bizarre
Among the standouts in the Abigail cast as reckless hacker Sammy is Kathryn Newton. Not the first horror comedy Newton starred in is Abigail. She earlier portrayed the awkward high schooler Millie Kessler in Christopher Landon's body-swap slasher Freaky. Best summed up as a cross between Freaky Friday and Friday the 13th, Freaky sees Millie unintentionally swapping bodies with the infamous serial killer Vince Vaughn's Blissfield Butcher. While the Butcher wants her own body since it would be simpler to attract victims in his new body, Millie wants hers back.
With perfect body-swap acting, Newton and Vaughn both give amazing performances in this film. Vaughn is funny as a flustered teenage girl and Newton is entirely realistic as a cold-blooded killer. Freaky is just as horrible as Abigail and equally hilarious.
Alternatively, orphan
Abigail's central conceit is that the title character, although appearing to be a child, is really far older and a killer. The psychological thriller Orphan by Jaume Collet-Serra likewise displayed the same conceit. Star as a couple lamenting the loss of their unborn child Vera Farmiga and Peter Sarsgaard. Played by Isabelle Fuhrman, they adopt a nine-year-old girl with a strange past as a means of processing the loss.
The bodies discover their new daughter isn't what she seems when they start to stack up. Like Abigail, Orphan develops his idea just as a means of satisfying the grisly slasher thrills of a killer massacring innocent victims. However, both hiding a sinister twist and turning the killer into a child help to set these movies apart from their cinematic rivals.
The Oman
Richard Donner envisioned who might raise the Antichrist in The Omen, after Roman Polanski envisioned how he might arrive on Earth in Rosemary's Baby. After an American diplomat loses his newborn daughter, a priest persuades him to covertly adopt another baby whose mother recently passed away during childbirth, so leaving his wife uninformed. They call that baby Damien and, as it happens, he is the son of the Devil sent to wreak havoc on Earth.
Like Abigail, The Omen centers on an apparently innocuous small child who turns out to be a bloodlustful killer. It also features plenty of gnarly carnage to complement its kills, much as Abigail does. Though its first release received negative reviews, The Omen has since been reassessed as a sinister, suspenseful, well-paced horror classic.
Ready or Not
Before Radio Silence was given the keys to the Scream series, they mapped themselves with their darkly humorous thriller Ready or Not. While Abigail is a modern take on Dracula's Daughter, Ready or Not presents a modern interpretation of the human-hunting activities found in the Richard Connell short story "The Most Dangerous Game." As a young bride whose husband's rich family searches her on her wedding night as part of a Devil-worshipping custom, Samara Weaving stars.
Everything about Ready or Not runs quite brilliantly. The script is smart, funny, and full of surprises; the direction is strong; the editing is razor-sharp. Weaving is also a total powerhouse in this amazing subversion of the "final girl" role. In this rendition of the narrative, the supposed slashers will be lucky if the supposed "final girl" leaves any of them alive; she is alone.
The Lost Boys
For dark laughs, Abigail enjoys greatly subverting the clichés and rules of the vampire genre. The Lost Boys accomplished the same in the 1980s. The Lost Boys opens with two teenage brothers and their single mother moving to the fictional seaside town of Santa Carla, California. After the initial culture shock of moving from Phoenix, Arizona, to the coast of California, the brothers begin to suspect that the town is crawling with the undead.
The Lost Boys made vampires cool at last after decades of stuffy, gothic Dracula adaptations. The older brother, Michael, falls in with a gang of vampires led by Kiefer Sutherland’s creepy yet charismatic David, while the younger brother, Sam, teams up with a pair of amateur vampire hunters. It’s a perfect blend of coming-of-age comedy and vampire thriller, with an unmistakably ‘80s aesthetic.
M3gan
With its campy tone and its killer kid, Abigail feels like this year’s answer to 2023’s sleeper hit M3GAN. Allison Williams plays a roboticist who finds herself unequipped for parenthood when her young niece is unexpectedly put under her care. Rather than doing the parenting herself, she creates a robot doll that will look after the kid for her. It’s a surprisingly incisive satire of lazy parents who put an iPad in their baby’s hands and rely on technology to raise their kids for them.
Much like Abigail, M3GAN is all about an unstoppable killing machine with the appearance of a harmless little girl. They even share the same pre-kill ritual; similar to Abigail, M3GAN dances before slaughtering her victims. Whereas Abigail is tonally and stylistically similar to The Lost Boys, M3GAN is comparable to Chopping Mall.
From Dusk Till Dawn
Initially, Abigail sets itself up as a crime movie about a group of criminals carrying out a job that goes awry. It only turns into a horror movie when the titular ballerina reveals that she’s a centuries-old vampire. This twist would’ve been really effective, too, if the trailers hadn’t given it away. Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino pulled off a similar twist in their own vampire movie, From Dusk Till Dawn.
In its first act, From Dusk Till Dawn is set up as a crime caper about a pair of bank robbers taking a vacationing family hostage to get them across the Mexican border. But at the midpoint, when they stop off at a strip club, it suddenly turns into a horror film as everyone in the club is revealed to be a vampire. As a fun-filled, vampire-infested horror comedy, From Dusk Till Dawn is the perfect movie for fans of Abigail.
