31 Days of Halloween 2024 — Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2012)
I write entirely too much about Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2012) today. Before that, why not check out my essay about the Deadites of The Evil Dead (1981) from yesterday? It’s relevant, I swear.
You can stream the movie on Hulu.
28. Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2012)
Horror was in a weird place in the 2010s. Horrific elements were becoming frequently embedded in mainstream popular culture. The Walking Dead was a crossover phenomenon, expanding from a comic to a prestige TV drama. Mainstream horror films with PG-13 ratings were more and more frequent. Five Nights at Freddy’s exploded into the popular culture of Gen-Z. Through mass exposure and tragedy, Slender Man had already become an internet myth willed into broader notoriety. Gravity Falls explored horrific and unsettling themes on the Disney Channel.
There are a lot of reasons for the broader injection of horror themes into everyday experience during the decade, but there is a handful that I have seen as the primary inflection points where culture shifted and horror became cool. I’ve already mentioned Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead, the origins of which occur in 2003, but the weight of making a mainstream reinvention of zombies outside of video games is a foundational element of the 2010s to come. There was also the premiere of American Horror Story, Ryan Murphey, and Brad Falchuk’s campy horror anthology starting in 2011.
But I think there are two key texts that we need to focus on. The first was 2003’s The Zombie Survival Guide, written by Max Brooks, which he would follow up with 3 years later with World War Z (2006). I could write a lot about those two books. Maybe one day I will.
The other text, and perhaps more relevant to today’s film, was Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009), cheekily co-authored by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith. The fusion of the horror genre and classic, mainstream literature (or as mainstream as Jane Austen still was in the 2000s) was huge. As we move into the 2010s, horror goes more mainstream than it ever had, at least since the popularity of B-movies in the 50s and the slashers of the 80s.
It is in their very strange period of horror in US culture that emerges Seth Grahame-Smith’s Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter in 2010, which was adapted to film in 2012.
Today’s film is one I’ve long avoided; I only watched it at the request of a reader of this series, AllyBear of the Supernatural Selection Discord, who has been going through her own journey of horror films. It has been fun to watch her experience the slashers of the 1980s as I have been engaged with this essay project, so at her suggestion, I decided to watch Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2012).
So, as much as I find Pride and Prejudice and Zombies to be important to the evolution of mainstream horror in the 2010s, I was never much of a fan of it. I found it a little funny, but I wasn’t enthusiastic about it. By the release of Grahame-Smith’s Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, I already felt the concept had worn thin. Doubly so when I first saw that it was adapted into a movie.
What sparked an even greater disinterest is how 2010s the movie appeared. The fact it was also shot in 3D also pushed me away from it. I never watched it, nor had any real desire to watch it. Until now.
I knew I was in for a rough time when I sat down to watch the film and my wife decided to sit down to watch me watch it. She has been absent for most of these movies this month, but she made it a point to stay and watch this one as I watched it.
I mentioned before my nature as a critical observer and my background in reviews. I work as a writer and composition instructor, so most days are filled with contemplation and criticism about writing in one form or another. It can be exhausting being critical when it is a daily task. Poking holes is not something one should make a daily routine of because it runs the risk of wearing you out while also consuming your ability to find enjoyment in things. When I get asked why I am not more critical of movies and instead focus on elements I like, it is because of this. If it is not something where I need to be expressed critically, I would prefer to acknowledge what I like, or what I can learn from the work, rather than tear it apart.
Life’s too short to tear everything down all the time. I was that way in high school and my early 20s. I choose not to regress.
All of this backing to say that I kind of enjoyed Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter because of how flawed it was. I rarely label a movie stupid. This was a stupid movie. They exist. But at least this was a fun(?) stupid. Or, maybe it wasn’t?
I spent a lot of time with my head buried in my hands based on things that occurred or references made during the film. But I can at least commend the movie for delivering on its premise, no matter how hamhanded and ridiculous it was: Abraham Lincoln did, indeed, hunt vampires.
The fusion of a horror-revenge story with Abraham Lincoln’s biography, surprisingly, does not work very well. How he managed to hunt down the vampires while pursuing a law degree, also serving in the Illinois state legislature, and later the U.S. House of Representatives, all while seeing over the most significant war on U.S. soil is, frankly, superhuman. The movie is intensely predictable as a result, but not necessarily in a fun way. At times my eyes rolled so far back into my skull that it hurt.
I try to take the movies on their level and not bring in my own preconceived notions in assessing them. I found the task impossible with this movie. The predictability of the film annoyed me. It felt like a second-grade book about Lincoln, but if you added in a subplot about him being a totally sweet vampire assassin.
Speaking of vampires; I like rules, and while they can be broken, that doesn’t mean they should unless there is meaning in doing so. Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan’s The Strain (2009) take the rules of vampires but bends them to make them more scientific. It works. Even goddamn fucking Twilight (2008) by Stephenie Meyer presents consistent rules with vampires that make sense within their context.
The vampires of Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, are largely inconsistent within the movie, but also pick and choose elements of vampirism it wants to play with, making the vampires incredibly boring. Traditional vampires can be fun because of those rules and how writers can get around them while adhering to them. Rarely does throwing out rules outright lead to an interesting vampire.
Yes, I clocked that one of the vampiric apothecaries sold a form of sunblock. The film never establishes the importance of that, so for most audiences, we just see vampires in full fucking daylight, suffering little for it. Yet, they are still vulnerable to silver. Also, apparently, vampires in the film are not allowed to kill each other until the end of the film when they seem to be able to or at least get damn close to doing so.
It is a lack of consistency that bothers me most about the movie. Both with vampiric rules in the way that they jettison some elements while keeping others, and the lack of an internal consistency with the rules that are kept.
And please, do not get me started on the scene where the vampire throws a horse at Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (something I must now say if I ever mention Abraham Lincoln in this context; he is a distinct entity now). Even the horses seem invincible, as Abe can instantly take this prone horse, who was just yeeted 80 feet into a stampede of horses, mind, to its feet and ride it in pursuit of the vampire that killed his mom as a child.
I understand that is a lot to take in. So is the scene.
While I was watching the movie, my wife stepped out to smoke. Our living room window was open, so we could periodically talk. At one point I checked where I was in the film, and my immediate, gut response to seeing the timer was “I am only 39 minutes into this piece of shit?”
The guffaw from the window made the viewing worth it.
