Abigail

A group of would-be criminals kidnaps the 12-year-old daughter of a powerful underworld figure. Holding her for ransom in an isolated mansion, their plan starts to unravel when they discover their young captive is actually a bloodthirsty vampire.

Release date: April 19, 2024 (USA)

Director: Matt Bettinelli-Olpin

Distributed by: Universal Pictures

Budget: $28 million

Cinematography: Aaron Morton

Edited by: Michael Shawver

“Ballerina vampire”: It sounds like a particularly good Mad Libs mash-up, deliriously absurd. Even if you haven’t seen “Abigail,” the gore-fest film that premiered last week, you can probably picture the monster of its title — the fangs, the blood-spattered white tutu. Somewhere, a Spirit Halloween executive is salivating.

However unlikely Abigail, the bloodthirsty dancer, seems, she has a long pop-culture lineage. Ballerinas are almost as much of a staple in horror as vampires. For decades, film and television have mined drama from the idea of the ballerina whose onstage elegance conceals terrible darkness — from the 1948 classic “The Red Shoes” to the pulpy 2021 Netflix series “Tiny Pretty Things.” Sometimes that drama is anchored in the truths of ballet life: the pursuit of impossible perfection, the bodily sacrifice required by a physical art. But sometimes these stories lean on the broadest clichés, using ballet as a beautiful canvas to spatter with blood.

“I don’t think anyone is going to see ‘Abigail’ for the dancing,” said Adrienne McLean, a professor of film studies at the University of Texas, Dallas, and the author of “Dying Swans and Madmen: Ballet, the Body, and Narrative Cinema.” “What they’re going to see it for, without necessarily being aware of it, is this pop culture idea of the dangerous ballerina.”

Abigail isn’t the only dangerous ballerina of the moment. Casting is about to begin for a workshop of a new musical based on the movie “Black Swan” (2010), whose disturbed, self-destructive antiheroine embodies many of the gothic-ballet genre’s stickiest stereotypes.