I decided to do a movie outside of Shudder, as I do every so often. And this time I thought, hmm, there are two recent horror movies with little girls on Peacock, but which? And I decided to go with the newer one, since the older one I’m already way too far behind to accomplish anything useful for my hungry public.

And so, I watched Abigail, which is a crime turned horror movie about a kidnapping. See, there’s this ballerina kid, and a whole bunch of people in masks who don’t know each other (a la Reservoir Dogs) come together to kidnap her. Then they go to an isolated estate to lay low and wait for the ransom, which might have gone according to plan except that they decide to not trust each other. And once things start going wrong, boy howdy do they escalate, in all kinds of ways that you would never have considered possible.

I mean, unless you watched the trailer. Don’t watch the trailer, for the love of all that is holy.

But that aside: you know what, obviously the Tarantino movie does a better job of being a crime movie, and I could name a few horror movies along these lines that do a better job of doing what they do (spoilers below the cut), but as mashups go? I’m pretty happy with this one!

Spoiler list just below, please disregard if you care about spoiling this movie.

1. I’m not sure Abigail should even be considered along this axis, but Fright Night is a better vampire movie.
2. Let the Right One In is a better “girl who is not what she seems” movie.
3. As I already said, Reservoir Dogs is a better crime movie.
4. Aliens is a better “mother/child relationship” movie.

But like I said before the cut, the flavors did come together pretty well, you know?

[1] Due to spoilers, I did not use a poster with this tagline, although I could have. This poster is a lot more ambiguous, though, which I like. I’m sad that they leaned so hard into immediately spoiling this movie in the trailers, when the actual movie drew out the tension for so long. (Maybe a third of the runtime?)