Note: This post contains spoilers for the movies Abigail (2024), Knucklebones (2016), and Midsommer (2019). Furthermore, I don’t have permission to use imagery from these movies, so you’ll have to look up imagery for them if you’re interested in watching them.
So I watched the movie Knucklebones, released in 2016, which was both written and directed by Mitch Wilson. I stumbled upon this movie by sheer accident, and this led me down a rabbit hole where I am now forced to review three movies, and those movies would be Abigail (2024), Knucklebones (2016), and Midsommar (2019), none of which are even remotely related in plot or quality except for the fact that all three are horror and that I somehow and in someway wrote three short stories that have similarities with them even though I had never seen any of those films until just recently.
So, to make a long story short, I’m going to compare those three films to my three short stories, and I’ll review those films along the way.
Knucklebones (2016)
This movie is a train wreck in progress. Aside from being made on the cheapest budget possible, it is definitely a throwback to ’80s shlock horror, and boy is it shlock horror. I’m going to give a brief rundown of this movie only because almost no one has heard of it. I only stumbled across it because I was looking for something new to watch, and I recently found the Fawesome streaming service, which is where I watched this train wreck unfold.
The premise is that five young college students or high school students (they’re kind of unclear about that), two guys and three girls, head out to an abandoned Texas factory for some incredibly unknown mysterious reason and “accidentally” summon the demon, Knucklebones, by playing a weird version of the children’s game. Oh, and this demon is one that Nazis found a way to summon during WWII, Nazis, I might add, that were somehow stationed in the middle of Texas.
So, to give some plot here, a young college student (I’m going to assume she’s in college) tries to commit suicide because her boyfriend breaks up with her. She survives her own suicide attempt, so her two female friends decide to cheer her up by driving her out to the middle of nowhere along with two guys they don’t even really know so they can all drink and explore an abandoned factory where a lot of mysterious deaths occurred (because that makes sense. Nothing cures suicidal depression like that!).
All five of them find some abandoned Nazi demon-summoning paraphernalia (left there by the Texas Nazis) behind a wall and decide to use it to summon Knucklebones for some ungodly reason, don’t ask me why. (On a side note, I wrote a published short story titled Sleepover where six teenage girls decide to summon a demon, but the reason behind that was very specific and very well understood).
Naturally, Knucklebones kills them one by one in various gruesome ways. Just to ensure a body count, some thieves looking for copper show up at the factory, and they all get brutally murdered as well.
I’m not going to mince words. This movie is pretty bad. The acting is subpar, the budget is pretty thin, and the movie is the epitome of ’80s cheese, from the terrible one-liners by Knucklebones that are reminiscent of Freddy Krueger, to the gratuitous nudity that serves zero purpose except to show some T and A. I can say that this is the only movie I’ve seen that shows a young naked woman behind sliced in half from the vagina up…by a branch trimmer, of all things.
Anyway, in general, I give this movie a rating of 21° Scarenheit on my traumometer (That’s -6° Hellcius). I’d give it an even lower score, but I suspect this movie is the director’s homage to ’80s shlock horror, and I really don’t take issue with that. I can say that the protagonist gets rid of Knucklebones in a pretty clever way, and that raised the fearmature by a few degrees, but it’s not enough to save this car crash in action (Although, I did find the boob fight kind of funny).
Now, Knucklebones was released in 2016, and I wrote my own short story, “Knucklebones,” in 2022. My story has since been published in Bloody Twine #4. I had no prior knowledge of this film, but the similarities between the two are uncanny.
First of all, my story involves five high school kids, three guys and two girls, who go to a supposed haunted house out in the middle of the woods in order to spend the night there. The teens explore the “empty” house and encounter a weird little girl that tells them that Knucklebones is coming for them and is going to “put them in the wall.” The teens get trapped inside the house, and Knucklebones comes and takes them one by one up until the end, but the end is a twist ending, because that’s my specialty.
The little girl in my story, Ashley, sings a little skip-rope-type song about Knucklebones, and the college kids in the actual movie do the same thing over and over again in order to play the game. Thankfully, my lyrics don’t match theirs. My theory on this one is if that you say the word “Knucklebones” twice in a row, it just sounds like the beginning of a skip-rope chant.
As for my story, I was inspired to write it simply because, while lying in bed, I imagined an image of the Grim Reaper with four arms instead of two. That’s it. That was the inspiration for the story. Knucklebones in my story is simply that. The title came after the image.
My story, “Knucklebones,” is not one of my all time favorites, because I had specifically written it to emulate a cliché horror trope of “teens spend the night in a haunted house.” However, if I were to give it a fair judgement, I’d give it 71° Scarenheit on the traumometer (that’s 22° Hellcius). It’s well written, if not somewhat silly at times.
Abigail (2024)
In 2023 I wrote a published story titled “Missy.” “Missy” has been published on bloodytwine.com. In this story, a social worker travels out to the middle of nowhere to inquire why a young girl, Missy, has not been attending school. While talking to Missy, two vampire hunters show up and try to kill the girl, but Missy transforms into a monster and is able to dispatch both hunters. It turns out she wasn’t a vampire at all, but a widow, a type of supernatural giant spider that can take the shape of a human. After the deaths of the hunters, the social worker is then transformed into a widow because she tried to (initially) protect Missy.
This story isn’t one of my favorites. I had kicked this one around for years, and it was inspired by an old Monsters episode (you’ll find that I was inspired by a lot of that show’s episodes) titled “A Bond of Silk.” To give you some history, I watched that episode back when it aired in 1989 or 1990…I’m not exactly sure what year. It’s been awhile.
Anyway, I’d give my own short story 55° Scarenheit on the traumometer (that’s 13° Hellcius). It’s well-written, and it’s a fun read, but it lacks something, and I can’t quite put my finger on what that could be.
Now, I wrote “Missy” in June of 2023. The movie Abigail, written by Stephen Shields and Guy Busick and directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, was announced to be in production in April of 2023, so no, I had no prior knowledge of this movie.
In Abigail, some organized-crime thugs are hired to kidnap a preteen ballerina named Abigail. They do their job, take Abigail back to a predetermined location, a big mansion, and wait for instructions. It turns out that the job is a trap, and an assassin has been sent to kill them all. That assassin is actually Abigail, who turns out to be a 400-year-old vampire. Hilarity ensues, and all of the thugs are killed by the end of the movie except the woman who felt sorry for Abigail in the beginning, but she is let go because she tried to protect Abigail.
In general, I was disappointed in this movie. I gave it a 63° Scarenheit on the traumometer (that’s 17° Hellcius). I think the concept for Abigail is cool, but three things irritated me about it.
The first is that crosses don’t work on vampires, which makes no sense, because religion has always been tied to vampires. Even the hopping vampire of Asian culture can be stopped by a sacred scroll. This idiocy started in the ’90s and is, unfortunately, persistent to this day. My problem with this is that it takes the vampire out of the supernatural and puts it more into the realm of disease, which is science fiction, and though I watch science-fiction horror, I have an expectation when it comes to the undead.
The second is the piranha fangs. The vampires in Abigail have numerous sharp teeth, which makes them more like vicious maulers rather than silent, seductive killers. I think this kind of thing started with the TV series Supernatural and the movie Priest, but there are probably other examples beyond these two. Giving vampires piranha teeth just reminds me of someone like, “let’s make this Edgy McEdgerton and Dirk Dark it up.” I’ve kind of done this in my stories by making really psychotic vampires, but I’ve always had a reason for it.
The third irritation is that vampires in Abigail can be made with one bite. This, once again, falls more into the disease category than the supernatural, and the logic doesn’t follow. You’d have a vampire apocalypse pretty quickly, and that’s in spite of the “biter” being able to control the “bitten” as shown in Abigail.
All in all, I think I liked Interview with the Vampire better( I’ve watched the movie and read the novel), and I didn’t really like that story, but it was closer to the original concept of how a vampire is supposed to be.
Midsommar (2019)
Now we’ll get to Midsommar, which was written and directed by Ari Aster.
First of all, let me say, I have nothing bad to say about this movie. It earns a solid 100° Scarenheit on the traumometer (that’s 38° Hellcius).
Secondly, I’m not going to give away much about this movie if you haven’t seen it. Just go watch it. It’s about five college students, four guys and one girl, who travel to a remote village in Sweden for a “midsommar” festival that only occurs once every 90 years. It’s an awesome frickin’ movie.
Thirdly, I’ll go over my own short story, “Wynter,” because the similarities between the two stories are striking. I published “Wynter” on bloodytwine.com in 2022, and it’s now published in Bloody Twine #3. Though I’d heard of Midsommar by then, I hadn’t seen it or knew anything about it for the stupidest of reasons. You see, I had thought this movie was a modern adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, so I had zero interest in it. If you’ve ever read and have studied as much Shakespeare as I have, you’d have no interest in that play, either. In other words, it was a case of mistaken identity, and I am truly sorry for that (I’m not a fan of Shakespeare).
In my short story “Wynter,” five college students, two guys and three girls, encounter a strange village in the middle of nowhere during Thanksgiving break. To sum up this story, all five of them are dragged out of their car, stripped naked, and put on a burning stage in order to be used as vessels for the spirits of dark fay so that those same elder beings can usher in the season of winter.
I wrote part of the story in “Fay English,” and that was actually supposed to be Middle English, but I figured out too late that the translator I used to translate Modern English to Middle English (the language in The Canterbury Tales) was some fanboy gamer’s throw-together for tabletop roleplaying (won’t make that mistake again). I couldn’t find an actual translator for it online…At any rate, my “Fay English” is kind of reminiscent of the Swedish used in Midsommer.
Let’s just say there are weird similarities between Midsommar and “Wynter,” but I believe the reason behind that is because we used the same source material. For one thing, I was influenced by the movie The Wicker Man (the original one), so there’s that. I think Midsommar was named as such simply for when its festival takes place, while I named “Wynter” as such because the whole story revolves around the changing of the seasons.
At any rate, “Wynter” is one of my favorite stories, and it gets a solid 83° Scarenheit on the traumometer (that’s 28° Hellcius). I’d rate it higher, but the ending is kind of iffy for me. (For anyone who’s interested, I modeled the Holly King in my story after Snow Miser from the 1974 Rankin and Bass made-for-TV-movie The Year without a Santa Claus. I did not, however, model him after the Ice King from Adventure Time.)
And that was the weird movie-review rabbit hole I went down. Normally, I don’t review movies, because in general, I don’t care to, but I felt like I needed to just because of the comparisons between these movies and my own stories. Hopefully, I won’t have to do this again.
So I Watched Abigail (2024), Knucklebones (2016), and Midsommar (2019)… Copyright © 2024 bloodytwine.com Matthew L. Marlott
