Abe Lincoln: Vampire Hunter - an Abe-omination

First, a few things: I went into this movie in probably a bad mood, and I had read the book. I liked the book – it wasn’t great, but it was a cool concept and I thought the author, Seth Grahame-Smith, did a good job.

The book was written like Abe Lincoln really was a vampire. G-S tried to take existing journal entries and letters from Lincoln and add in vampire things and made it sound realistic. The vampires that existed in the novels were NOT adverse to silver, they COULD be seen in mirrors and they could harm each other. Aside from the whole moving really fast, being really strong, not totally loving sun and needing to drink human blood (and immortality), vampires are just like us. This a concept that he carried out well.

The movie was totally different from the book. It was written to appeal to a mass audience. I guess I get that. Like, you can’t spend a third of the movie on Lincoln’s childhood (like the book), that stuff is boring! You need to narrow it down to his hunting days and other super exciting things like the battle of Gettysburg.

So when I watched AL:VH the movie, I was pretty upset. Like, I really did not like it at all, and I think it was because I had read the book. The concept is still crazy, but I don’t feel like they carried it out well at all. The decisions that were made to make it appeal to a mass audience I thought threw off everything: the pacing, the plot, the realism and everything that held the book together.

I guess my biggest criticism is that the choices that they made to change the movie from the book didn’t make any sense to me. Let’s take the vampires needing to be harmed by silver. This did not happen in the book. They added it to, I guess, make vampires more relatable (?) to the public’s general idea of how vampires work--also, they probably added it so they could show the one “badass” scene where Lincoln pours silver on his axe and show it in the movie trailer 40,000x. But adding this makes everything else get thrown out of sync. Now the vampires can’t just die by regular bullets at Gettysburg, so they need a silver shipment. Now you have to come up with this crazy story about collecting all(!) the silver in D.C., smelting it, forging it into bullets, cannon balls, and bayonets, and then having the underground railroad carry it by hand 80 miles to Gettysburg all in one single day. You don’t need to make these kind of ridiculous plot decisions if you just stick to the story as it was written and leave silver out of everything. It only hurt the movie, and I can’t see them losing an audience if the vampires aren’t hurt by silver.

This sort of thing kept happening in the movie and all I could think was this wasn’t necessary! You had better material than this sitting right in front of you! They went out of their way to say that vampires couldn’t harm each other in the middle of the movie. But wait – in the beginning of the movie, Henry saves Lincoln by beating up Barts, and at the end of the movie, Henry and Adam get in a bloody fight! Why go away from the book to say that vampires can’t hurt each other and then just totally screw it up! You didn’t need to do that in the first place!

So my watching of the movie was really messed up by thinking about all these extra unnecessary decisions (also, a horse-jumping scene. Lolwut). Taking a step away from it and writing this post today, I think I should calm down a bit and come off my 0/5 stars stance. It was a “fun” movie with some good action scenes and a lot of dead vampires and axe-using. There wasn’t a good plot but I shouldn’t really expect one, it did what it was set out to do.

So if you’re going to see it, I’d recommend not reading the book. Or I’d recommend going and reading the book, and stopping there. Or I’m completely wrong.