Kathryn Newton of the slasher Freaky can be seen on the big screen this weekend in the newly released horror comedy Lisa Frankenstein, and in just another couple months (on April 19th, to be exact), another genre project she worked on, the Universal Monsters project Abigail, will also be reaching theatres. While doing the press rounds for Lisa Frankenstein, Newton took a moment to hype up a scene we’ll be seeing in Abigail – and it’s actually a scene we get a glimpse of in the trailer embedded above. A vampire dance scene.
Abigail is coming our way from Radio Silence, the filmmaking team that previously brought Ready or Not, Scream (2022), and Scream VI to the screen. Radio Silence members Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett directed the film, while the third member of the trio, Chad Villella, is a producer. This movie, which was once going by the title Dracula’s Daughter, has the following synopsis: Children can be such monsters. After a group of would-be criminals kidnap the 12-year-old ballerina daughter of a powerful underworld figure, all they have to do to collect a $50 million ransom is watch the girl overnight. In an isolated mansion, the captors start to dwindle, one by one, and they discover, to their mounting horror, that they’re locked inside with no normal little girl.
Newton told Collider, “Matt and Tyler, I love them. They’re another duo that every time I would be like, ‘Hey, Matt, come here… Should I do this?’ And he’s like, ‘Yeah, sure.’ And I’d try it. There’s this thing in the movie where I dance, and in the script, it was about this long. It was like, ‘This blah, blah, blah, and she dances.’ I’m like, ‘Okay.’ And I worked on a dance and I shot, like, a two-minute thing on my phone for them to pick hopefully five seconds of. They turned it into a whole thing. It’s a whole thing. It’s like M3GAN on steroids, and I did not expect that.“
Newton is joined in the cast by Melissa Barrera (Scream), Dan Stevens (The Guest), William Catlett (Black Lightning), Kevin Durand (X-Men Origins: Wolverine), and Angus Cloud (Euphoria), who play her fellow kidnappers, with Alisha Weir (Roald Dahl’s Matilda the Musical) as Abigail. Giancarlo Esposito (Breaking Bad) is also in the cast.
Radio Silence’s Scream movie collaborators William Sherak, Paul Neinstein, and James Vanderbilt of Project X Entertainment are also producing the monster movie alongside their Ready or Not producer Tripp Vinson. Ron Lynch and Macdara Kelleher serve as executive producers. Jay Polidoro, Holly Goline, Kelly Cannon, and Jacqueline Garell are overseeing the project for Universal. Stephen Shields wrote the initial screenplay for this take on Dracula’s Daughter, and Guy Busick (who co-wrote the two recent Scream movies with Vanderbilt) has since done some revisions.
I’ll never complain about an out-of-nowhere dance scene in a horror movie – in fact, one of my favorite moments in horror happens to be the scene where the possessed Angela dances by the fireplace in the original Night of the Demons. So I look forward to seeing what kind of moves these vampires have.
Are you looking forward to the vampire dance scene in Abigail? Let us know by leaving a comment below.