Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter - review

Seth Grahame-Smith’s first mash-up novel, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, sold a million copies, the title alone being a brilliant provocation. Prior to this, Grahame-Smith’s CV included The Big Book of Porn and The Spider-Man Handbook, so it wasn’t especially from the literary side of the mix that he was coming.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is currently being filmed, with Natalie Portman producing. Meanwhile, here’s Grahame-Smith’s second shocker, published only two years ago but already energetically directed by the Kazakh action merchant Timur Bekmambetov, whose Russian-made vampire hits Night Watch and Day Watch were followed by an equally successful Hollywood debut, the comic-book adaptation Wanted.

Grahame-Smith claims the idea for this second crossover came to him in a bookstore, when he saw piles of biographies of Lincoln, on the one hand, and a stack of vampire product, including Twilight and True Blood, on the other, and he realised he could shuffle the two together to unleash another mutant genre. But actually it is, in its bonkers way, a much less random idea than that.

For he has ingeniously recast the whole history of slavery and the American Civil War as one big vampire story — trashing those tragic events, to be sure, but giving horror fantasy a much darker and more ambitious backdrop than usual.

As a boy, Abe Lincoln tries to save his little black friend Will from a beating by a sadistic slave-owner, Barts — but provokes this monster into a fatal attack on his mother, a horror he witnesses (the real Lincoln’s mother did indeed die when he was nine — of milk sickness).

Abe grows up determined to avenge her. But he discovers that merely shooting Barts in the eye doesn’t kill him — and Abe’s life is saved only by the debonair British vampire hunter, Henry (Dominic Cooper), who then, in the obligatory training montage, equips Lincoln with the fantastic martial arts skills he needs, centred on his silver-coated axe. All the fight sequences here, making good use of 3D, specially for blood-splatter, are choreographed by another Kazakh, Igor Tsay, and have a vigour and exoticism that adds considerably to the movie’s impact.

Lincoln’s political career and vampire-hunting proceed in parallel — climaxing, shamelessly, at Gettysburg, where it turns out that the whole South is run by vampires and only silver weapons can stop them.

Their chief, Adam (a character added for the film), who lives in a giant plantation mansion among dripping live oaks, is a great turn by Rufus Sewell, evidently embracing villainy as his destiny, after the disaster that was playing the detective Aurelio Zen for a TV series that was fast cancelled.

Adam, who was around to see the Jews build the pyramids, announces that slavery is inevitable: “One of the revelations of my 5,000 years — we’re all slaves to somebody.”

But Lincoln believes otherwise. With Will (Anthony Mackie, in a role also cooked up for the film) by his side, in context a much greater implausibility than supernatural bloodsuckers, Abe fights Adam and his cohorts in a series of spectacular set-pieces — at a ball in his mansion, in the midst of a great stampede of horses, and, climactically, aboard a hurtling steam train, heads rolling, blood flying.