ORIGINALLY ANNOUNCED AS a “secret monster movie for Universal”, internet chatter has new horror Abigail pegged as “a reimagining of the 1936 Universal Classic Monsters film Dracula’s Daughter”. But directors Matt-Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett say that was just something writer Stephen Shields had “percolating in his head in the early stages”.
“To his credit,”Bettinelli-Olpin explains, “he was also thinking really smart about, ‘Okay, how do I tell an original vampire story and also make it something that feels eminently sellable?’ So that was, at one point, its path into the studio. Then for us it was, ‘Well, let’s just make it as weird and as wacky and as different while still playing in the lineage and in the lore of vampires. How do we make this its own unique flavour?’”
The pair then brought Guy Busick – who wrote , and – on board. “Before you know it, we’re flying out to Dublin to shoot the movie. It was not the way, in our experience, movies usually get made,”
