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Aside From the Vampires, Lincoln Film Seeks Accuracy

...This is a film set, at the 179-year-old Evergreen Plantation here, and the cast and crew of the movie, “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter,” are scrambling to deliver a summer blockbuster. It is set for release, in 3-D, by 20th Century Fox in June of next year.

The filmmakers are also creating one of the more startling historical revisions in movie memory. Their Lincoln, you see, is a devoted slayer of the undead.

Hollywood is certainly in need of an attention getter. And in building one around Abraham Lincoln, it might be poised to expand the presidential aura far more dramatically than did films like “The American President,” which turned a fictional chief executive into a romantic lead (with a hint of Bill Clinton), or “Air Force One,” in which a president became an action hero (foretelling a flight-suited George W. Bush?).

Seth Grahame-Smith, who wrote the pop-novel mash-up on which the movie is based, said he was beginning to suspect that his “Vampire Hunter” conceit tapped something deeper than originally planned. Speaking by telephone last week, he said he couldn’t help thinking of Lincoln and vampires on seeing President Obama with “his chest pumped up” after the killing of Osama bin Laden.  

The idea of Lincoln as supernatural savior was born in 2008, when Mr. Grahame-Smith, who is based in Los Angeles, had just finished the manuscript for his successful Jane Austen sendup, “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.” He found himself in bookstores between tables full of “Twilight” novels and those piled high with Lincolniana. “Sort of shrewdly, from a cynical standpoint, I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if you could combine these two things,’ ” Mr. Grahame-Smith said. That was the impulse behind his “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter” novel, which was published last year by Grand Central Publishing.... 

Read entire article at NYT