Abraham Lincoln The Vampire Hunter

What do you get when you mix Tim Burton, Timur Bekmambetov, and Abraham Lincoln? An eyegasm of epic proportions is what you get.

There’s little that passes me by in the entertainment department; I usually know about most things that are coming out, but I have to admit, this caught me by surprise. Based on a novel by Seth Grahame-Smith, “Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter”, I didn’t know the movie has been made until I saw the posters for it.

What a miss! I envy people that knew about this and could live in that amazing limbo of hype and anticipation for it.

I don’t like reality too much these days and enjoy diving into anything my screen has to offer. A perplexing cogitation as to why life can’t life be a British TV-Show often keeps me up at night. So it’s safe to say I’m seriously baffled at how I let this one slide.

I ran into a poster on the web, searching for something completely different, and fell on my behind. I didn’t read anything above it or around it, just saw the poster with that famed Abe Lincoln pose with an axe next to him and the title that read - ‘Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter’, and I was done for.

Come again?

It’s funny how we sometimes imagine things to the smallest detail based on one visual aspect we came across. It all just flashed through my head, Abe running through woods smashing Vamps with his axe, then getting cleaned up somewhere before he returns to the White House... Wait?! Stop.

This is way too good!

I just can not believe that someone woke up one morning and decided, I will use the likeness of one Abraham Lincoln, rewrite history, and make him a President by day, and Vampire Hunter by night? The brilliance of that idea is just - bewildering.

You probably think my enthusiasm about this is way much. Visuals in my imagination right now are running wild. I love vampire movies ever since I watched Dracula as a kid, it was the first movie I watched in the theater; you can imagine, with my otherwise sunny exposition, it simply took me in.

Dracula worked because it has beautiful imagery, but also because it had a great story. A dangerous, smart plot. These days, you have vampire movies, and you see all the blood, the biting, the killing, all that exciting things these moves are so popular for, but the plotlines are thin and not as exciting as they should be for the genre.

You can like Twilight and all, and I like it too, I adore The Vampire Diaries, but one must admit the plots are just all right. They all did the iconography right; dark woods, blood, I mean how great does blood look on screen, the running, the excitement of being on the edge of living & dying; but imagine merging all that with the coolest historical figure? The one already visually impressive on his own?

The creators behind this movie are monumental. One Tim Burton as a producer? Timur Bekmambetov, the guy that directed ‘Night Watch’ and ‘Wanted’? The guy that made me pee my pants out of the excitement by watching a bullet smash the window?

But the props have to go to the writer, all hail - Seth Grahame Smith. He not only wrote the book but also the script for the movie. You just know that’s going to be one helluva manuscript, without having anyone in the middle to fuck it up, like it usually happens with adaptations.

Make it stand out

Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

The way he’s interlacing real-life events with this vampire story is so smart. He’s leading into it brilliantly - Abraham’s dad had debt and his mother was killed by vampires when the dad wasn’t able to pay it off. Abe wows he will hunt down the vampires responsible for his mother’s death, and he kills them all. A bit unsophisticated in his anger he meets a vampire called Henry that teaches him not all vamps are bad and directs him to a slightly better cause - to kill only bad ones. Then the writer ties it with slavery- Abe finds out some plantation owners are actually vampires and are buying slaves for food, not for labor. In order to end slavery, vampires that buy slaves must be killed.

!!!

A couple of years into his political carer, Abe meets Edgar Allan Poe (I swear this is getting better and better!) who tells him vampires are being chased out of their ancestral homes in Europe and flocking to America. Now see how brilliantly this story connects with real life - vampires are chased out of Europe due to their “involvement” with Elisabeth Bathory. Elisabeth was a Hungarian countess also known as Blood Countess or Countess Dracula. She was one of the biggest female serial killers that ever existed; killing young women, with her male helpers, because she believed that bathing in a virgin’s blood will preserve her youth. In the book/movie, Elisabeth’s helpers are actually vampires who are being chased out and decided to flock to States because of the slave trade.

!!!

Then he ties it with civil war; Lincoln learns that the vampires in the South intend to start a civil war so they can conquer the North and enslave all humans of America. Then he gets elected for President, the civil war starts, the vampires kill his son, and the Union wins over the Confederate vampires (sorry I just can not contain my excitement at this brilliance!). Then the famous shooting in the Ford theater, he’s killed by John Wilkes Booth, who is an actor and, you guessed, also a vampire!

The nation mourns him, just like in real life but then......Fast forward a century later, it’s the year 1963, Martin Luther King holds his famous “I Have A Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial, there’s a crowd all over, and then on the side you see Abraham Lincoln, listening to the speech. (!!!)

He really did not die, but his vampire friend Henry actually saved him and made him a vampire, with the most brilliant closing words known to mankind:

“Some men are just too interesting to die!”

The Vampires + the most interesting story from American History = just orgasm, nothing else.

The movie opens in - June 2012.

‘Dark Shadows’ and ‘Abe’ in the same month?!

Hell, we can fucking all die in December, for all I care.