10 Best Horror Movies Like Abigail

Summary Fans of Abigail will enjoy other blood-soaked vampire comedies like The Lost Boys and From Dusk Till Dawn.

Abigail puts a fresh comedic spin on vampire mythology, offering a balance of gory horror and slapstick humor.

Radio Silence have a knack for reimagining classic horror movies like Dracula's Daughter and Scream.

From previous films by Radio Silence to similarly blood-soaked vampire comedies like The Lost Boys, there are plenty of great horror movies like Abigail for fans to check out. Helmed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, known collectively as Radio Silence, Abigail puts a fresh comedic spin on the vampire mythology. It revolves around an elite group of crooks being sent to abduct the 12-year-old ballerina daughter of a powerful figure in the criminal underworld, only to find that she’s actually a bloodthirsty, centuries-old vampire. She’s not trapped in a mansion with them; they’re trapped in a mansion with her.

Before turning their sights to the vampire genre, Radio Silence had put their own uniquely energetic and darkly comic stamp on horror cinema with Ready or Not and their Scream films. Abigail isn’t the first movie to wring pitch-black humor out of vampires having fun; this was previously seen in From Dusk Till Dawn. From other killer kid movies like The Omen and Children of the Corn to the 1930s Universal Monsters classic that it reimagines, there are a ton of great horror movies that fans of Abigail need to watch.

10 Dracula's Daughter

Abigail is a modern reimagining of the 1936 Universal Monsters classic Dracula’s Daughter. Gloria Holden stars as Count Dracula’s daughter and fellow vampire, Countess Marya Zaleska, who seeks to break free of Dracula’s influence and lead a normal life following his death. After failing to break his curse by destroying his body, the Countess instead turns to psychiatrist Dr. Jeffrey Garth. She abducts Dr. Garth’s assistant, Janet, and brings her to Transylvania for a climactic battle.

While Abigail bears little resemblance to its original inspiration, Dracula’s Daughter has the same sense of vampiric carnage and the same focus on character over horror. Like Abigail, Dracula’s Daughter offers a fresh take on the familiar vampire lore amidst a sea of samey Dracula adaptations. And they both have a playful sense of humor under all the terror.

9 Scream (2022)

Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett, the directors of Abigail, first became household names when they revitalized the Scream franchise with their 2022 “requel,” simply titled Scream. Before Radio Silence came along, it didn’t seem like anyone could direct a Scream movie besides Wes Craven, who directed the first four films. But Radio Silence brought their own unique sensibility to the Scream franchise, honoring Craven’s legacy while bringing the property into a new era.

Scream satirizes a whole new generation of horror filmmakers and their fans, poking fun at reverent franchise reboots and toxic fandoms. Much like Abigail, Radio Silence’s first Scream movie strikes the perfect balance between gory horror violence and goofy slapstick humor. It mixes the two genres beautifully, because the scares never detract from the laughs and the laughs never detract from the scares – they complement each other.

8 Children Of The Corn

Part of the genre fun of Abigail is seeing an ostensibly innocent little kid – or, at least, someone who looks like a kid – effortlessly slaughtering a bunch of grownups. The mother of all killer kid movies is Children of the Corn, Fritz Kiersch’s film adaptation of the Stephen King short story of the same name. Children of the Corn takes place in the fictional rural town of Gatlin, Nebraska, where all the children have been influenced by a mysterious entity to ritualistically murder all the adults.

A young couple named Vicky and Burt are driving across the country when they stumble into the town and run afoul of the murderous children. Children of the Corn plays as a more or less standard slasher, with a conventional story structure and a boatload of blood-soaked violence. But much like Abigail, the young children doing the killing put a fresh spin on that formula.

7 Freaky

Kathryn Newton is one of the standouts in the cast of Abigail as reckless hacker Sammy. Abigail isn’t the first horror comedy that Newton has starred in. She previously played the lead role of awkward high schooler Millie Kessler in Christopher Landon’s body-swap slasher Freaky. Best described as a cross between Freaky Friday and Friday the 13th, Freaky sees Millie unwittingly switching bodies with the Blissfield Butcher, a notorious serial killer played by Vince Vaughn. Millie desperately wants her own body back, but the Butcher wants to keep it, because it’s easier to lure victims in his new body.

Newton and Vaughn both give fantastic performances in this movie, nailing the body-swap acting trick of embodying each other’s roles. Newton is fully believable as a cold-blooded murderer and Vaughn is hilarious as a flustered teenage girl. Freaky is just as funny – and just as terrifying – as Abigail.

6 Orphan

The central conceit of Abigail is that the title character seems like a child, but is actually much older – and is actually a murderer. The same conceit was used in Jaume Collet-Serra’s psychological thriller Orphan. Vera Farmiga and Peter Sarsgaard star as a couple mourning the loss of their unborn child. As a way to process the grief, they adopt a nine-year-old girl with a mysterious past, played by Isabelle Fuhrman.

When the bodies start piling up, they realize their new daughter isn’t what she seems. Like Abigail, Orphan builds up its premise purely as an excuse to indulge in the grisly slasher thrills of a killer massacring unsuspecting victims. But making the killer a kid and hiding a sinister twist both go a long way towards setting these films apart from their cinematic peers.

5 The Omen

After Roman Polanski imagined how the Antichrist might come to Earth in Rosemary’s Baby, Richard Donner imagined who might raise him in The Omen. When an American diplomat loses his newborn baby, a priest convinces him to secretly adopt a different baby whose mother just died in childbirth, leaving his wife none the wiser. They name that baby Damien and, as it turns out, he’s the son of the Devil who’s come to wreak havoc on Earth.

Much like Abigail, The Omen revolves around a seemingly harmless little kid who turns out to be a bloodthirsty killer. And much like Abigail, it has plenty of gnarly gore to go along with its kills. Although The Omen was met with unfavorable reviews on its initial release, it’s since been reappraised as a creepy, suspenseful, well-paced horror classic.

4 Ready Or Not

Before Radio Silence were entrusted with the keys to the Scream franchise, they put themselves on the map with their darkly comedic thriller Ready or Not. Whereas Abigail is a modern spin on Dracula’s Daughter, Ready or Not puts a modern spin on the human-hunting antics of the Richard Connell short story “The Most Dangerous Game.” Samara Weaving stars as a young bride whose husband’s wealthy family hunt her on her wedding night as part of a Devil-worshipping ritual.

Everything about Ready or Not works spectacularly. The direction is intense, the editing is razor-sharp, and the script is smart, funny, and full of surprises. Plus, Weaving is a total badass in this brilliant subversion of the “final girl” role. In this version of the story, the supposed “final girl” is all alone – and the supposed slashers will be lucky if she leaves any of them alive.

3 The Lost Boys

Abigail has plenty of fun subverting the tropes and conventions of the vampire genre for dark laughs. In the ‘80s, The Lost Boys did the same thing. The Lost Boys opens with two teenage brothers and their single mother moving to the fictional seaside town of Santa Carla, California. After the initial culture shock of moving from Phoenix, Arizona, to the coast of California, the brothers begin to suspect that the town is crawling with the undead.

After decades of stuffy, gothic Dracula adaptations, The Lost Boys finally made vampires cool. The older brother, Michael, falls in with a gang of vampires led by Kiefer Sutherland’s creepy yet charismatic David, while the younger brother, Sam, teams up with a pair of amateur vampire hunters. It’s a perfect blend of coming-of-age comedy and vampire thriller, with an unmistakably ‘80s aesthetic.

2 M3GAN

With its campy tone and its killer kid, Abigail feels like this year’s answer to 2023’s sleeper hit M3GAN. Allison Williams plays a roboticist who finds herself unequipped for parenthood when her young niece is unexpectedly put under her care. Rather than doing the parenting herself, she creates a robot doll that will look after the kid for her. It’s a surprisingly incisive satire of lazy parents who put an iPad in their baby’s hands and rely on technology to raise their kids for them.

Much like Abigail, M3GAN is all about an unstoppable killing machine with the appearance of a harmless little girl. They even share the same pre-kill ritual; similar to Abigail, M3GAN dances before slaughtering her victims. Whereas Abigail is tonally and stylistically similar to The Lost Boys, M3GAN is comparable to Chopping Mall.

1 From Dusk Till Dawn

Initially, Abigail sets itself up as a crime movie about a group of criminals carrying out a job that goes awry. It only turns into a horror movie when the titular ballerina reveals that she’s a centuries-old vampire. This twist would’ve been really effective, too, if the trailers hadn’t given it away. Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino pulled off a similar twist in their own vampire movie, From Dusk Till Dawn.

In its first act, From Dusk Till Dawn is set up as a crime caper about a pair of bank robbers taking a vacationing family hostage to get them across the Mexican border. But at the midpoint, when they stop off at a strip club, it suddenly turns into a horror film as everyone in the club is revealed to be a vampire. As a fun-filled, vampire-infested horror comedy, From Dusk Till Dawn is the perfect movie for fans of Abigail.