Directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett have established themselves as notable horror filmmakers over the past decade, rising to the point that they were tapped to helm the last two Scream films. Following the so-so response to Scream VI, they’ve now gone back to original storytelling with the new film, Abigail.

A group of six criminals – given the Rat Pack nicknames of Joey (Melissa Barrera), Frank (Dan Stevens), Sammy (Kathryn Newton), Peter (Kevin Durand), Rickles (William Catlett), and Dean (the late Angus Cloud) – have carried out a job to kidnap a young girl, Abigail (Alisha Weir), under orders from their boss, Lambert (Giancarlo Esposito). They take her to a remote mansion, where they are to wait for 24 hours while Lambert secures a ransom from Abigail’s rich father.

What happens during that long day is better if it goes unspoiled (although the trailer straight up gives it away), but suffice it to say that the relatively simple job the group thought they signed up for turns out to be much more difficult. Locked in the house, on constant alert for an unexpected threat, and dealing with a team that is collectively not that intelligent, they must somehow find a way to survive.

Written by Stephen Shields and Guy Busick, the film is full of many weird decisions, starting with its tone. What at first seems like it’s going to be a tense thriller turns into a hybrid of camp and suspense, a combination that is tough to pair and doesn’t work well here. The filmmakers seem to want to have the film be both scary and funny, depending on the situation, but they fail to find the right balance, and so it winds up being neither.

That’s not to say that you won’t laugh while watching it, as there are times that it gets so ridiculous that laughter is the only possible response, but perhaps not in the way Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett had intended. Dumb characters repeatedly fail to listen to others, throwing themselves in harm’s way for, I guess, the sake of a kill. Abigail, a budding ballerina, is shown striking ballet poses in increasingly absurd situations, scenes that would be legitimately hilarious if they weren’t also supposed to be horrifying for the characters.

The filmmakers don’t have to be subtle in a film like this, but the overly expository script and bad dialogue don’t help with the overall quality. Two separate scenes feature two different characters revealing details about the group, as if once wasn’t enough, and painful one-liners and other groan-worthy lines litter the landscape. It would be one thing if the film’s main purpose was to be a comedy, but since it clearly isn’t, those parts fall flat.

Barrera, Stevens, and Newton have each made names for themselves in recent years, but they have varying degrees of success here. Scream star Barrera is given the choice role, so she comes off the best. Durand and Cloud each play characters with lower-than-average intelligence, a choice that seems like overkill initially and doesn’t become better as the film goes along. Esposito coasts on his reputation, not that his character has much to do anyway.

There are moments in Abigail where you can tell that Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett still have talent and could have shown it more if they had chosen other paths in the film. Alas, they did not, as so we’re left with a movie that only commits halfway to both of its two options, succeeding at neither.

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Abigail is now playing in theaters.