Pre-Production Unit: The Illness and "Cure" Explained

This blog post will explain a key story-telling component of our film, the illness which affects Abigail, as there has been some confusion as to exactly what the illness does, and what it is based on.

The illness itself is a form of a real-life disease, "Necrosis."  Necrosis is a disease where the body's tissue effectively dies off due to a lack of blood-flow to body-parts. This is shown through the rashes and slow rotting of body parts, which can eventually become gangrene.
Our disease is a variation of this, as ours affects Abigail a lot faster than Necrosis, so much so that it will kill her relatively quickly if not for the experimental drug trial Douglas signs her up for.
Once Abigail takes the experimental drug (the "cure") she is provided, it takes affect almost immediately, with her rashes disappearing and her generally feeling a lot better.

However, "the cure" has a drawback. Although it appears that it has reversed the process of Necrosis that was afflicting Abigail, it turns out that her body is in fact "stealing" cells from all living organisms around her, and using them to repair the ones missing in her body. In effect, her Necrosis wasn't cured after all, and her body has merely gained the ability steal cells from other beings to repair the constant damage caused by the Necrosis.

The procedure in which Abigail steals people's cells happen overtime, but for some reason it does not affect her father at all, because he and Abigail share similar genetics, he is left immune to the affects of her cell "stealing." First, plants begin to wither and die extremely quickly around Abigail (A sign their cells are being stolen) and when Abigail's parents buy her a pet goldfish as a reward for being brave through the clinical trials she is going through, it only lasts until the next morning, and is found dead.
It doesn't stop there though. Eventually Abigail's illness begins to affect the humans around her, most prominently her step-mother Delaney. These people begin to develop rashes, and become lethargic and generally run down. Eventually people get ill across the country and begin to drop dead in the streets. A sign that someone is about to die from having too many cells stolen is the sudden nosebleed they suffer before dropping dead.