To bring vampires back in a big way for “Abigail,” their latest descent into a gory darkness, horror meisters Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett aka Radio Silence mounted a spectacular beginning.
Audaciously, they introduce Abigail (14-year-old Irish actor Alisha Weir) in a wordless sequence: A petite ballerina dancing “Swan Lake.”
Tchaikovsky’s tragic romantic classic sets the dramatic mood when minutes later a ragtag bunch of kidnappers (Melissa Barrera, Dan Stevens, the late Angus Cloud) grabs the dancer, install her in a deserted mansion and wait for the ransom.
“That opening sequence originally was we meet Abigail dancing in a rehearsal studio,” Gillett, 42, said in a shared Zoom interview with his cohort. “It’s implied she’s an owner of that space and that she’s just dancing for herself.
“When we were in Dublin” – where “Abigail” filmed – “we were talking about how to really open the movie in as grand a cinematic way as possible, knowing that the majority of the of the story was going to take place in a fairly contained location – even though we do travel to a lot of places within that house.
“We knew we had only one real opportunity to give a sense of scope and scale to the movie outside of that house and we found this incredible theater in Ireland! And the idea just immediately evolved from a small ballet studio to a What if?
“What if this entire theater was Abigail’s? And she can show up and dance whenever she wants? We just loved this idea that she’s dancing to an audience of no one.
“That the real performance is going to take place later that night, once she’s locked away in the house with the rest of those characters. She’s setting the stage if you will, to be a timid little waif at the mercy of these horrible people, the kidnappers who have their big plan.”
Was the name Abigail perhaps meant for the unwary moviegoer who might think this is Annabelle from that hit franchise?
“We haven’t really thought about that,” Bettinelli-Olpin, 46, answered. “At some point we just started calling her Abigail and we really liked it. We looked to movies like ‘Jaws,’ ‘Alien,’ ‘Terminator’ or ‘Predator’ — all these movies where the title character is the villain. There was something about that, that we just really latched onto.”
As to why this duo behind hits like “V/H/S” and “Scream VI” is billed as Radio Silence?
It goes back, Gillett said, to when no one would return their calls. “It was always ‘Radio Silence’ because every door we knocked on, no one ever opened the door.”
“Abigail” opens April 19
