Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter directed by Timur Bekmambetov (review)

An anecdote about Lincoln, so folksy it must be apocryphal, has it that he once responded with disdain to Mary Todd's interest in séances. After attending one such event, Lincoln allegedly said that "for people who like that sort of thing, it's exactly the sort of thing they would like."

Some historians might approach Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (hereafter ALVH) with a similar weary dismissiveness. Much more likely, more than a few will show their antagonism to it both in writing and in the classroom. But perhaps the discipline should pause a bit before taking umbrage, particularly its members inclined to take a sort of theoretical umbrage at what might seem like the writers and filmmakers' desire to create the ultimate form of Jean Baudrillard's "hyperreality," cannibalizing the past to both entertain and sever us even more completely from the realities of history.

Based on the wildly popular novel by Seth Grahame-Smith, Goth maven Tim Burton produced and Timur Bekmambetov directed this tale of the sixteenth president as a vampire slayer. Given this genealogy, it should come as no surprise that ALVH mostly works as an action film/supernatural thriller. The first act focuses on a young Lincoln's desire to take revenge on the vampire responsible for his mother's death. His hatred of slavery emerges out of his desire to kill vampires who live like literal parasites off of the peculiar institution. Although the novel makes much of the 1840s and 1850s (and Lincoln's rivalry with that vampire stooge Stephen Douglas), the film more or less skips these decades and drops us in the midst of the Civil War. In perhaps the silliest (if best) part of the film, the outcome of the conflict hinges on whether or not Lincoln, now nearly superhuman in his axe-wielding vampire-hunting prowess, can get a train full of silver to the battlefield at Gettysburg (for reasons I won't trouble you with here).

The previous paragraph surely offers all the fodder the cultured despisers of such fictions need to dispatch ALVH as an especially noxious example of the death of historical thinking. It is, after all, arguably hard enough to help students do the necessary spadework on the complexities of the Civil War era without having to clear away yet more cultural debris—and talk about vampires.

But there may be more to the film than a thumbnail description reveals. For example, the majority of the films produced about the American Civil War constitute a cinema of reconciliation. In ALVH, however, the Confederacy appears in the darkest of palettes, a sinister conspiracy of slaveholders and fiendish supernatural evil. The film imagines slavery as being both an economic system that shaped the American South into a powerful political force in early American life and an institution that allows vampires to hide within its systemic violence.

This is one place the film borrows one of the more interesting ideas of Grahame-Smith's novel. Grahame-Smith and Bekmambetov essentially repurpose the idea of "slave power" and use it to imagine American history as a canvas painted with monsters. In the novel, Grahame-Smith skillfully incorporated much of the vampire language popular in the nineteenth century for describing the plantation system (though, notably, critic of slavery Charles Sumner preferred Frankenstein imagery to describe both southern slavery and the Confederacy, perhaps because of his friendship with Mary Shelley). The film fails at this, and yet there are hints of the novel's genius, especially when Lincoln's own rhetoric about the evil influence of slavery intertwines naturally with the vampire slaying.

On balance, raising historical problems about ALVH seems a bit like questioning the physics of Back to the Future. Unlike Spielberg's self-consciously magisterial Lincoln, this film concerns itself little with either Lincoln's personality or the larger issues of the sectional crisis. And yet, ALVH does function as a historical work, an act of imagination that intersects with...