Seth Grahame-Smith’s Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter was a gloriously silly idea combining the history of Abraham Lincoln with a bloody fight against vampires, a kitschy-cute premise, even if he’d already sort of beaten the joke to death in his first book. Or as the book description put it:
While Abraham Lincoln is widely lauded for saving a Union and freeing millions of slaves, his valiant fight against the forces of the undead has remained in the shadows for hundreds of years. That is, until Seth Grahame-Smith stumbled upon The Secret Journal of Abraham Lincoln, and became the first living person to lay eyes on it in more than 140 years. Using the journal as his guide and writing in the grand biographical style of Doris Kearns Goodwin and David McCullough, Seth has reconstructed the true life story of our greatest president for the first time-all while revealing the hidden history behind the Civil War and uncovering the role vampires played in the birth, growth, and near-death of our nation…
So what do you get when you let the Kazakhstani director of Wanted make a movie adaptation of what was basically a 300-page mash-up of prose styles? Judging by the trailer, you get Blade with top hats, basically.
The twist is that he kills vampires, you see.
SETH GRAHAME-SMITH: What if we took dry historical stuff and rewrote it in the style of a Jerry Bruckheimer movie? Wouldn’t that be hilarious?
MOVIE EXEC: That’s a great idea! Only problem, I don’t really read “books.” Too wordy. BUT, what if we took your book of dry historical stuff written in the style of a Jerry Bruckheimer movie, and adapted it in the style of a Jerry Bruckheimer movie?
SETH GRAHAME-SMITH: What? That doesn’t make any sense, it totally ruins the joke.
…Wait, how much did you say you were going to pay me?
Opens June 22nd.