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Abigail (Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett 2024)
Directed by Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett, who have made very solid Scream requels and the really excellent Ready or Not, we had high hopes for Abigail. With lots of promise and overall good audience reactions we were unfortunately very disappointed. Abigail is bad. Real bad. No character development, no movitations, no sense of geography, and any even remote potential for fear or suspense was undermined by the marketing. Any hope that it would challenge or disrupt tropes and stereotypes, given that the vampire is a girl, are compromised completely by the film’s ending. It is reasonably watchable as a second-screen film, or something to have on in the background, which is not meant to be a compliment.
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SPOILERS IN THIS EPISODE
Pitch Black (Twohy 2000)
Tower Heist (Ratner 2011)
Last Stop in Yuma County (Galluppi 2024)
TOPIC INDEX – Abigail (Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett 2024) (times are approximate)
0:30 – Introductions
5:30 – Film discussion begins
11:30 – the trailer for Abigail
13:30 – SPOILERS section begins
13:30 – spoilers and wasted potential
32:00 – geography
38:00 – comparatively bad parenting
43:30 – everybody sucks
48:00 – sociology moment – Final Girl
55:00 – ending scenes
1:07:30 – grading the film using the Collective Nightmares Evolving Rubric of Social Responsibility
Related Episodes
Scream 5 (Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett 2022)
Scream 6 (Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett 2023) (forthcoming)
Becky (Milott and Murnion 2020) (forthcoming)
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“Horror films are our collective nightmares.”
Episode 130
Keywords
sociology, horror, vampire, gender, enshittification, geography, bad mothers, final girl, parents, gore, blood, girl,