PopHorror Let's Get Scared
Everyone needs a ride or die friend like Abigail…emphasis on the “die” part.
In the 2023 horror/drama Abigail, the small-town life of bullied teen Lucas Wright (Tren Reed-Brown, Unsung 2016) is turned upside down when Abigail Cole (Ava Cantrell, Lights Out 2016) and her mother Eve (Hermione Lynch, Laced 2023) move next door, hoping to start anew after a cryptic past. Abigail wants to help her new neighbor and friend fight back, but she takes things a little too far.
As Cantrell bludgeoned people to death on set, her father Bryan Cantrell, an executive producer of Abigail, watched proudly. A successful entrepreneur who appeared on Shark Tank in 2018 to secure a deal for the Radiate Portable Campfire, Bryan has never shied away from taking on a creative project. Therefore, when the opportunity arose to enter the world of film and work alongside his daughter, he couldn’t pass it up.
PopHorror recently chatted with Bryan about his journey to becoming a first-time executive producer, how Abigail has been numerous years in the making, and the pride felt at watching his daughter effortlessly portray a brutal antagonist.
PopHorror: I watched Abigail this morning and I loved it! It was one of those movies where, you think you know what’s happening and then it just goes totally elsewhere.
Bryan Cantrell: That’s what attracted me to that script. My daughter Ava, she’d been attached to it for years, but I remember when she got it and we were reading it and I’m like, “Oh, that’s a nice little couple twists, I like it.” I love it when it keeps you guessing.
PopHorror: Definitely! Going off of that, you mentioned that Abigail has been a lot of years in the making. It was canceled at one point. Can you talk about the journey of this movie?
Bryan Cantrell: Ava was booked on it years ago, maybe a year before the pandemic. The first time that it had almost gone into production, it failed. There was something that happened with the production company, and so it just got canceled. They didn’t have a shoot date at that time, so it just kind of dissolved. And then it was maybe four or five months later, it was reborn, and the writer [Gunnar Garrett] and a new director were attached, and another production company. And about five days before it was going to shoot, the pandemic started and then it got canceled again.
Of course, Ava was so disappointed by this point and was losing faith that it would ever get made. Fast-forward maybe five or six months as we got through the pandemic, things started to become a little more open, and there was some filming that was happening. We had become friends with the writer who owned the rights to the movie at that time, and he really wanted to resurrect it one more time. And when we talked, he’s like, “I would love a producing partner. I would love for this to get made, but I need somebody that will see this to the end.” He knew about my background with Shark Tank and other businesses because we had talked many, many times.
And then we had brought on a director [Melissa Vitello] that I had known, and we ended up making a short, all three of us together along with Ava, just to kind of make sure that we all were on the same page as far as we could work together, and then have something to show to an investor that was interested in coming back for the third time on this project. So we made the movie, it was great. We sold it to some film festivals and it did really well. And then when we showed it to the investor, he was enthusiastic about it. Took him a few months before he said that he wanted to come back on board and invest in and fund the movie. And then that was it. I think that was in January ’22, so we shot it in April, and that’s how it actually came to fruition.
PopHorror: How does it feel from your end, as well as Ava’s, to finally see it come to fruition?
Bryan Cantrell: Oh my goodness, it feels so good. I’m so happy that it turned out good. I’m so happy that the performances were great, the look of the movie, everything I believe is much bigger than the budget that we had to work with. I think everybody, because of their passion, from everybody on set, the PAs up to the partners that made the movie, I think we’re all very pleased, and we all put everything that we had into this to make it happen. I’m super excited for everyone to see it.
PopHorror: You have the entrepreneurial background and I also saw that you wrote a novel, Pirates of the Wild West. Had you ever worked in film before executive producing?
Bryan Cantrell: Never on this side of it. When I was a kid, I grew up in Tucson, and I always did theater in grade school. During that time, I had an agent in Tucson, because they did a lot of western types of shows and movies at a place called Old Tucson Studios. They filmed shows like High Chaparral and other big shows from the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s. And at that time, the show Little House on the Prairie, that was a big show when I was a kid, and they did a spinoff of that called Father Murphy that filmed at Old Tucson. And so I got cast as one of the orphans on that show. For a few years, I just did commercials and whatever was filming in Tucson, I never went to LA, I never had any bigger opportunities. But things that were filming there, I got to play parts in at some points in time. So a little bit as a kid!
PopHorror: As far as your daughter, has she been doing this for a while?
Bryan Cantrell: Yes, she started at about 11 years old, maybe 10 years old. She did a bunch of short films in the beginning and commercials. And then she got a guest starring spot on a Nickelodeon show called The Haunted Hathaways. That was a really popular show at that point in time, and the writers really liked that character and Ava. So they ended up making her a recurring character, she was kind of the villain. That show ran for two years and she had a big amount of episodes, and then she continued to work in movies and television, just as co-stars, guest stars.
Then her next big thing was Lights Out, which was a horror movie from Warner Bros. That was a very successful horror movie, it was a great story. It was a YouTube short that got a huge amount of attention just because it was so great. It was like a minute or two. And James Wan, who is a very high level horror director/producer, loved it and then brought on the person who made that, the director, David Sandberg, to direct the feature. Since then, he’s gone on to do DC movies, he’s a big director.
PopHorror: Have you and Ava ever worked in a creative capacity like this before, or was Abigail the first time?
Bryan Cantrell: We’ve made a couple little shorts, which was fun, just to get our feet wet and learn the process from behind the camera. One of them she directed, and she had a fun time doing that. Her and I did a comic book together one time, that was really fun. So we’ve had little projects. The whole household is very creative, my wife is a stylist and has always been in fashion. And so the creative aspects of our household are pretty high. As an entrepreneur, you have to be creative with your own marketing and your ideas, so we try to instill that with her, as well. But of course, she’s going to college and wants to be a forensic accountant. She wants to have one side of stability, and the other side in the creative arts.
PopHorror: Smart!
Bryan Cantrell: That’s a good balance.
PopHorror: You operate Dark Gravity Studios — did you have that prior to Abigail, or did you create it in conjunction with this movie?
Bryan Cantrell: I had it before, but it was under-utilized. We didn’t do much with it. We created the comic book under that publishing name, and then the shorts, but it wasn’t a real business. There was not much income from it. But when I published a book, that kind of changed. At that point in time, I incorporated it into an LLC so that we could actually make a business out of this if it started to generate revenue. I’m keeping it as a publishing house and a production house.
PopHorror: Can you talk about what production of the movie was like?
Bryan Cantrell: Absolutely! Since I was kind of learning as I go, I had to have a great team, and I did. I had other great producers, I had a great director, and from them, we found a fantastic sound person, an AD, a great director of photography. That was super helpful because the entrepreneur side of me and the business side of me was able to do those tasks, giving everybody everything they needed to perform their job the best that they could.
That was really what my job was and what I excelled at. Anything that was happening on set, if there was fires, I would either put it out or help put it out. On a low-budget movie, there’s tons of those things and you have to be creative to overcome the challenges of producing day to day, 12- to 16-hour-day shoots, not by throwing more money at it, because there wasn’t more money, but by being creative and solving problems the best that you could on site. So it was actually really, really fun. As hard as it was and as tiring, I really had a good time with that because there’s little failures, but there’s big successes in that type of work.
PopHorror: Where was it filmed at?
Bryan Cantrell: The film was supposed to take place in Alabama, and originally the movie was scheduled to be produced there. But at that point in time, when it started its path, it had a much higher budget to accommodate that. And when it got around to us doing it, it was probably a third of the budget. We had to do something where everyone didn’t have to travel so far. So we did it in central California near a town called Oakdale, and so everybody was able to drive there and stay there. We pulled some of the crew from northern California and central California to accommodate what necessary positions needed to be filled.
PopHorror: Well it definitely looks like Alabama in the film!
Bryan Cantrell: It did, it had a really good rural feel. That was my first time and it’s so full of almond orchards. I’ve been to Alabama as well, it’s a lot greener and lush, but it certainly had that rural aspect to the area that we were looking for, kind of small-town feel. It still had a ’70s aesthetic to it without having to costume it that much, which was great. Especially the school, even inside the bathrooms, it had fixtures and stuff that all was actually from the ’70s. So some of those things helped keep the production budget down. Even finding cars from the ’60s and ’70s to utilize was readily available in that town.
PopHorror: I feel like this movie is different from anything I’ve seen. You have this friendship, almost love story, going. It’s pretty endearing, but at the same time, it’s so gorey and suspenseful. Can you speak to that?
Bryan Cantrell: I think all horror/slasher movies need to have a very dramatic beginning, and the script accommodated that. Our first five to eight minutes is that, it’s like, “OK, I’m gonna be watching this slasher type of movie.” And then once that is done and you have the opening credits, it becomes a drama. At first, it’s kind of a difficult mother/daughter drama, but becomes a quirky love story in the middle of that.
And for the next 30 minutes, you’re wondering as the time clicks by, what is wrong with this girl? She’s a typical teenager to her mom, she’s kind of moody and things like that, and then she’s perky to the other main character Lucas, who’s getting bullied, and she’s trying to help him and support him. And as that 30 minutes goes by until the next big reveal, you’re just watching a drama and you’re not really sure why this girl is getting a little more off and off as time goes on.
And then once you hit that moment when there’s a big turn, the movie speeds up. The camera changes as well. We were using more steady shots, the camera didn’t move. And then from that point on, they used a steady cam, where the camera’s attached to the camera guy, and so there’s a lot of movement visually to what you see on screen. And that was all intentional so that your blood was pumping from that point on with what was going to happen.
PopHorror: What was it like to see your daughter taking a bat to people?
Bryan Cantrell: *laughs* She’s always played crazy really well. She would tell you that this is not her character, she would not want to be friends with this person. But she can really embody somebody who has problems, or is an antagonist. A look back at her roles, she did a decent amount of comedy. But even in comedy, she was usually the antagonist. It seems to be something that she plays really well at. And so to see her take this very challenging role, because there’s a mental problem underneath all of this, and the way that she was able to navigate all of that, it really made me proud. When she was on set and preparing for things, I really had this trust for her. If we do a movie again, it’s really easy to trust that I know I’m gonna get the best out of her, which is I think what you want as a filmmaker or director when you’re hiring someone. You want to make sure that the person you’re hiring is going to be able to do that job really well to a high level, and she nailed it.
PopHorror: And the actors who play Lucas and his mother were great too.
Bryan Cantrell: Yes, Tren! He had never acted before, but in his audition tapes, he just nailed it. He was so good. His physical makeup was just perfect for that role. And Karimah Westbrook (Suburbicon 2017), she’s great. Her and Ava have the same agent, which is how I found her. She’s a regular on All American, it’s on the CW, it’s been on there for like six seasons. She’s very accomplished. She plays a very sweet character on All American, so to get somebody of her caliber, the sell was, “You’re going to play somebody completely different from the character that everybody knows you as,” and she just loved that.
PopHorror: Do you see yourself executive producing again?
Bryan Cantrell: Absolutely. I want to see this all the way through of course, the movie just came out. You’re always learning, but this is my first and only movie so far at the feature level, and it’s the only thing out of everything I’ve made, including the shorts, that has the ability to make revenue. So I want to make sure that I know as much as I can before I start the next one of how the revenue comes in this industry because it’s still foreign to me. People can tell you what will happen or should happen, but until it happens, I don’t trust myself to move forward with the next project until I know all the elements from start to finish. So that’s why I’m sitting on it. If I was younger, maybe I would tackle it right away. But I don’t have the time to make mistakes as I go along in my 50s. I have to be more strategic and maybe oddly more patient so that I don’t have to recover from mistakes that I make.
PopHorror: Is there anything else upcoming for you? Are you still doing the campfire business?
Bryan Cantrell: The campfire business from Shark Tank, that was a fantastic experience. Once the pandemic had happened, we really accelerated that business. When everybody was staying at home, for some reason whatever it was, the backyard-ness of their lifestyle and the homeness, that product accelerated really quickly. The Amazon business, the website business just boomed. On the tail side of that, the wholesale side dropped off completely because the stores were closed, no one was ordering wholesale for distribution.
Around October of 2020, we ended up selling the company, and myself and my partner, we exited it, and it was fantastic. It was an amazing two-, two-and-a-half-year ride that I’ll never forget. And thankfully, Radiate still operates and does really well to this day. We talk to the new owners from time to time, and when I watch and see how they expanded the line and how well it’s doing, it really does make me feel great, the starter of that.
Thanks for speaking with us, Bryan! Abigail is available to rent or buy on VOD and most digital platforms.
