Abigail Star Teases Their Pitch for a Sequel

Melissa Barrera breaks down what she would like to see in a follow-up film.

With the horror-comedy Abigail being a Universal Pictures release and allowing for a variety of connections to other corners of the studio’s expansive lore of monsters to be developed, there’s a lot of potential for what could be explored in a possible follow-up film, especially based on how the ending resolves itself. There aren’t currently any confirmed plans for a sequel, but if the vampire movie proves to be a big enough hit with audiences, star Melissa Barrera has a few ideas of what she would like to see explored in a continuation of the concept and what the future would hold for this world of vampires.

WARNING: Spoilers below for Abigail

After the vampire Abigail (Alisha Weir) terrorizes her kidnappers, the vampire Frank (Dan Stevens) sets his sights on killing the young Abigail. Barrera’s Joey intervenes and is bitten by Frank, seemingly setting her on a path to becoming a vampire, though when Joey and Abigail team up to kill Frank, Abigail claims that Joey would be freed of this vampiric curse. Because she helped save Abigail, the young girl and her father (Matthew Goode) allow Joey to leave.

Barrera recently recalled that her biggest disappointment with the movie is that she didn’t get to fully transition her character into a vampire, but that in her own hopes for Joey’s future, her character’s connection with Abigail continued.

“One of my biggest, this is a spoiler, but one of my biggest frustrations with this film was that I’m not a vampire,” Barrera detailed to IndieWire. “Literally, it’s been my dream since I was ten years old to play a vampire, and when I found out [directors] Matt [Bettinelli-Olpin] and Tyler [Gillett] were doing a vampire movie, I was like, ‘Cool, oh, my God,’ and then my character’s the one that doesn’t become a vampire, and that made me genuinely so sad.”

She continued, “But she does get bit, so there is a possibility of, if the movie does well enough and they want to do a sequel, that there is a vampire Joey, if that happens … In my head, she gets home, she turns into a vampire, and then she starts hunting Abigail, ‘You lied to me. I helped you.’ That could be an interesting follow-up, and then they have to team up and defeat some other clan of vampires or something. That could definitely happen. I just want to wear the fangs and fly.”

In addition to this somewhat open-ended resolution to the story, Barrera also pointed out that the first version of the script she read implied more heavily that this was merely the beginning of the journey.

“There was a version of the script that pointed even more towards a sequel, and then the ending changed, and it became what it is,” the actor expressed. “To me, it felt, because I had read the other ending that was so much like, ‘This story will be continued,’ and this one is just kind of open-ended, I didn’t know that people were going to pick up on the possibility that it could continue.”  

Abigail is in theaters now.

Would you like to see the movie get a sequel? Contact Patrick Cavanaugh directly on Twitter or on Instagram to talk all things Star Wars and horror!