When does a historic crime become a mystery? And when, and why, does a President who made history become the sort of person who knocks on an unfamiliar door late at night, pulls out an axe, and chops off a vampire’s head? “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter,” directed by Timur Bekmambetov and produced by Tim Burton, opens next week—in 3-D, naturally—the film adaptation of the novel by Seth Grahame-Smith, who also wrote “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.” In this work, a mysterious figure in sunglasses and a vintage T-shirt hands the author a package containing Lincoln’s lost letters and diaries. On the page of one leather-bound volume, the future President, still a young man, has written,
This is the somewhat redeeming, and intriguing, plot of “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter”: it’s not just that Lincoln is trying to kill vampires in his spare time while also saving the Union, the way certain other vampire slayers also had to deal with high school. The whole Confederacy and events leading up to the Civil War are a vampire plot. (“Abe had known about Douglas’s connection to Southern vampires since their Senate race three years earlier.”) They want slavery to continue so that they can easily buy victims and have no one come looking for them. He starts with a personal grudge—vampires kill his mother and his first fiancée—but it takes a political form. In real life, the young Lincoln, on a trip on the Mississippi River, was deeply shaken by the sight of people being sold in a slave market. In the book, he follows them back to their new owners’ place and witnesses them being bitten in the neck.
There is something reassuring about this premise, in terms of what it says about how far we have all come. (And yes, vampire genre novels are a perfectly acceptable place to examine such connections; it does mean there may be spoilers here, though.) Slavery, once an accepted part of the economic and social setup of the country, now seems so outlandish, so cruel and inexplicable, that it sort of makes sense that vampires would be behind it all. It’s inhuman, after all. In the novel, it’s also a vampire who did away with the Lost Colony of Roanoke (he is seen running off with little Virginia Dare, the first child born to European parents in the colonies, squealing in his arms); how the small black child that Lincoln sees at the slave auction could also be carried off is also a puzzle.
The danger in this would be if the undead were an alibi, a way of giving the pro-slavery parties an out. (Vampires made us do it!) But in the book it just makes it worse. Slave dealers and key Southern politicians know exactly what’s happening to the slaves. Some are going along because of vampire money; others because they are in awe of vampires, who seem stronger and richer and just better. (“Mr. Lincoln, vampires are superior to man, just as man is superior to the Negro”—Jefferson Davis, vampire lackey.) Vampires are the clue, but slavery remains a moral mystery.
We like Lincoln these days, almost unreservedly—a President who, in his lifetime, was vilified by many, regularly threatened, and ultimately assassinated by a Confederate sympathizer and not, as it happens, by a vampire. We imagine him depressed, haunted by a lost love, gay, even on the deck of the starship Enterprise. What, then, to make of this moment of the Vampire Hunter—of the idea of the President as someone who not only has to dispatch armies and make speeches but drive a stake through a vampire heart with his own two hands? (The voiceover for the trailer makes this point explicitly.) One could, perhaps, argue that drones are the new stakes, and that we see Presidents as the new superheroes. But as a cultural diagnosis, this has to come with a major qualification: we are talking about a book and a movie called “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.” Absurdity and silliness—both very present in this rendering—are the balms of democracy. Jefferson Davis is the vampire’s useful idiot; but Lincoln, here, is still a cartoon character. Mad mashups are not hagiography.
Earlier this week, David Brooks, in the Times, worried that we don’t build enough impressive monuments, ones that properly project the power of the leader in the manner of Jefferson’s memorial, or Lincoln’s. Brooks thought that big statues might help with what he called America’s “followership problem.” This does not, as one might guess, consist of Americans blindly going along, in awe of the shiny and the rich, without thinking for themselves; quite the opposite. Brooks argues that we don’t defer enough, that we question “just authority” much too much, and aren’t sufficiently “grateful” for the leadership of élites. This seems exactly wrong—the sort of logic that gets you looped up with vampires. And because democracy was Lincoln’s great project—less so vampire hunting, sadly—a 3-D movie is, in its way, as fit a monument to him as any grand statue, and in some senses a better one.
Abraham Lincoln, the Vampire Hunter, doesn’t like the Lincoln Memorial. (This may qualify as a spoiler.) He’s bothered by the “marble throne”—“it causes me no small discomfort to be near that thing.” The book ends with Lincoln, now an undead vampire hunter, heading out to the Mall on a bright day in August, 1963, in a floppy hat, with shoulder-length hair, and sunglasses. He looks around for his real monument. When Martin Luther King, Jr., takes the stage to speak, he sees and hears it. Maybe afterward, when the speeches are done, he’ll go to the movies.
Photograph by Stephen Vaughan/20th Century Fox.
