Inside Abigail's fangtastic ballerina vampire tale

In theory, Abigail’s simple. A man known only as Lambert (Giancarlo Esposito, Money Monster) assembles an anonymous heist crew to kidnap a criminal kingpin’s (Matthew Goode) young daughter, Abigail (Alisha Weir). They must then smuggle her to a remote mansion where they are to keep her captive until her father coughs up $50 million in ransom. The crew is told they’ll have the cash in hand by morning, after which they’ll split it and go their separate ways. 

Unfortunately for the heist crew – Frank (Dan Stevens, Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire), Joey (Melissa Barrera), Rickles (William Catlett, Lovecraft Country), Sammy (Kathryn Newton, Big Little Lies), Peter (Kevin Durand, Essex County) and Dean (the late Angus Cloud, Euphoria), whose codenames are based on the original members of Hollywood’s Rat Pack – both the little ballerina and the big, creepy mansion are hiding sinister secrets.

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Little Miss Monster

“Everyone’s going to feel bad for her because she’s this sweet little girl who’s been kidnapped. Then she turns out to be so much more,” warns 14-year-old Alisha Weir. Abigail  might look like a girl, but she is a killing machine. And Alisha approached the film as if she’d been given two roles, even changing her voice depending on who she was playing – from “an innocent little kid,” to “more like a confident adult.”

“Getting to transform myself into a vampire was a completely different mindset. You’re not just changing to a different person – you’re changing to a different species. When I had those scenes where I’m killing everyone and I’m enjoying it, I just had to really get into it. I was no one else. I was only Abigail. I was only the vampire,” she explains “What really excited me was getting to wear the teeth and all the blood everywhere.”

Dance of the vampire

The same way that killer robot M3GAN had us by the throat with her viral dance moves, Abigail tippy taps across a slick, red trail of blood. 

Alisha had a dance background, but had never studied ballet, so she worked with movement coach and choreographer Belinda Murphy to develop how vampire Abigail would move, while learning how to perform the ballet sequence that opens the film. 

Belinda started with building up Alisha’s strength and stamina so that she could dance en pointe during the Swan Lake sequence (which normally takes dancers two years of concentrated study). “I started to train Alisha to go en pointe about eight weeks prior to the shoot,” Belinda says. “We focused on strengthening her feet, ankles and core. As we worked together, the choreography naturally became an extension of her own movement. She has this amazing ability to take on the technical requirements and the dance movements and in turn, build that into her character.” 

Belinda and Alisha also worked on creating the young, human version of Abigail’s movements, when she’s still disguising what she is. “That movement is very beautiful and very soft, nothing mature, as she appears to be just a little girl who simply loves to dance,” says Belinda. “Then, when she’s vamped out, the movement becomes sharper and faster with more purpose and with a maturity beyond that of a little girl her size. There is an adrenaline running through the body all of the time, but it is carefully controlled. An energy fueled by a vampire’s thirst. When she’s running, she has elegance even when it’s fierce. It has a feeling of a performance which is full of calculated mischief. She’s playing with them and loving every moment! So even when she was running, jumping and attacking, she always maintained that elegance. This was Abigail’s biggest recital, if you like.”  

Fighting and biting

Abigail doesn’t just prance up to her victims and give them a nibble. She needed to square off with much larger adults in close quarters for fight scenes when she really lets her hair down. Alisha worked hand-in-hand with fight choreographer and head stunt rigger Jessica Grant to create martial arts-style moves that would show off Abigail’s strength and agility, while keeping her dancerly grace, “Because she has that natural movement in her and that natural coordination, that was a breeze,” says Jessica. “As soon as you gave her a little note, she’d take it on board straight away and go with it.” 

Sinking her teeth in

Makeup designer Liz Byrne, who created the custom dentures and contact lenses that Alisha wore, was also told to let her imagination run wild with Abigail’s transformation. “We were told at the start that more is more. Matt and Tyler (directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett) said, ‘There cannot be enough blood. When you think you’ve got enough blood, add another 50 percent, and it still won’t be enough.’ So, everything was more – more sweat, more blood, more dirt.” 

And Matt Bettinelli-Olpin was delighted by his first sight of Abigail in monster mode. “When you first see Abigail become a vampire, you see her go from victim to the villain who you’re kind of rooting for,” he says.

Fun fact

Production designer Susie Cullen hinted at Abigail’s true nature in the murals painted on one of the mansion’s corridors, which show Abigail engaged in acts of extreme violence. “You don’t quite see the horrors within the paintings, but if the camera were to land on it, you could see that the content was a bit untoward,” she reveals. 

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Also watch: More vicious vampires and creepy kids on Showmax

The Last Voyage of the Demeter: Chapter 7 of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula centres on the Captain’s log for the sailing vessel Demeter’s voyage between Varna in Russia, and Whitby in England, as it unwittingly transports a vampire to his new hunting ground. Horror film The Last Voyage of the Demeter uses the unfortunate Captain Eliot’s (Liam Cunningham) log as a jumping off point to explore how the OG vampire, Count Dracula (Javier Botet), treats the crew of the Demeter as a combination of in-flight snack packs, and onboard entertainment. But say goodbye to your suave, ladykiller Drac with his widow’s peak and cape, or Count Orlok’s mysterious magnetism. This vampire is a bat-eared nightmare.

True Blood Season 1-7: This comic fantasy series based on the Southern Vampire novel series by Charlaine Harris imagines what might happen if the townsfolk of rural Louisiana became aware of all the supernatural creatures secretly living alongside them, including vampires, shapeshifters, witches and fairies. Look out for magnetic performances from the late Nelsan Ellis as chef turned witch Lafayette, Rutina Wesley as his cousin Tara, Alexander Skarsgård as charming vampire boss Eric Northman, and Denis O’Hare as vampire king Russell Edgington.

Van Helsing: Hugh Jackman plays Vatican-ordained vampire hunter Gabriel Van Helsing, with Kate Beckinsale as his sidekick Anna Valerious, one of the last surviving members of a Romanian family who pledged to destroy Dracula in this monster mash of an action-horror film inspired by Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and the horror films of the 1930s and 1940s. The story begins with Dracula killing Dr Victor Frankenstein around 1887, and only gets wilder as Van Helsing loses his memory after a fight near Notre-Dame de Paris with Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

The Boy: After nine-year-old Ted (Jared Breeze) is abandoned by his mother and neglected by his alcoholic father, John (David Morse), he starts collecting roadkill for cash. But Ted soon realises he can make more money if he just lures animals to their deaths on the busy road outside the motel his father manages. Not creepy enough? He also has a habit of becoming fixated on the motel’s other residents and slowly shifts his deadly habits to human prey, like sinister new guest William Colby (Rainn Wilson).

The Harbinger aka The Curse of Rosalie: Soon after Daniel (Will Klipstine) and Theresa (Amanda MacDonald) move to a new town with their troubled young daughter Rosalie (Madeleine McGraw), their neighbours start dropping like flies. Could the child be to blame? Her unnerving, dead-eyed stare is at least suspicious. And when she insists that her late birth father is burning in hell, mom and dad are a little unnerved. As the bodies stack up, and dead animals fill their backyard, the couple call in Indigenous American seer (Irene Bedard) to try to figure out what’s wrong with Rosalie.

Sharp Objects: Unlike her alcoholic big sister Camille (Amy Adams), young Amma Crellin (Eliza Scanlen) is her hyper-feminine mother Adora’s (Patricia Clarkson) perfect little princess. She still lets mommy brush her hair and dress her like a doll. Outside the house and away from mother’s eye, though, she is a devious 16-year-old with a cruel tongue who’s elevated bullying her peers to an art form. Just like her dollhouse, her charming appearance hides a deadly secret. “I’m incorrigible too. Only she doesn’t know it,” Amma hints with pride in this series based on the novel by Gillian Flynn.

The Exorcist: Believer: Since the death of his pregnant wife in a Haitian earthquake 12 years back, Victor Fielding (Leslie Odom Jr) has raised their daughter, Angela, on his own. One day, Angela (Lidya Jewett) and her friend Katherine (Ann Dowd) disappear in the woods, only to return three days later with no memory of what happened to them. Slowly, though, their behaviour becomes so sinister that the only explanation seems to be demonic possession. In his terror and desperation, Victor will seek out the only person alive who has witnessed anything like it before: Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn), whose daughter underwent exorcism in the original film The Exorcist (1973).  

Problem Child and Problem Child 2: On the lighter side of creepy kid movies, this dark comedy from the early 1990s centres on seven-year-old Junior (Michael Oliver) and all the different ways that he makes downtrodden but kind Ben Healy (the late John Ritter), and his snobby, social climbing wife Flo (Amy Yasbeck) regret the day that they adopted him from an orphanage. Not only is Junior as mean as a bucket of snakes, his best friend and pen pal is serial killer Martin Beck (Michael Richards), and he’s been returned to the orphanage at least 30 times for being a ginger menace.