Book vs. Movie
Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter
By Russ Bickerstaff
June 28, 2012
In this corner: the Book. A collection of words that represent ideas when filtered through the lexical systems in a human brain. From clay tablets to bound collections of wood pulp to units of stored data, the book has been around in one format or another for some 3,800 years.
And in this corner: the Movie. A 112-year-old kid born in France to a guy named Lumiere and raised primarily in Hollywood by his uncle Charlie "the Tramp" Chaplin. This young upstart has quickly made a huge impact on society, rapidly becoming the most financially lucrative form of storytelling in the modern world.
Both square off in the ring again as Box Office Prophets presents another round of Book vs. Movie.
Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter
At the suggestion of an editor, author Seth Grahame-Smith infused zombies into an old, public domain classic by Jane Austen. Kind of a weird, pop, post-modern re-write, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was an instant hit. Gruesome zombie scenes were inserted into Jane Austen's classic and everyone had a pretty good time. Grahame-Smith attempted to build on his success with a similar post-modern fusion work in Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. A couple of years after the novel was published, a film adaptation makes it to the big screen that has been produced by Tim Burton and Russian horror director Timur Nuruakhitovich Bekmambetov. How does the $69 million movie compare with the novel on which it is based?
The Book
The idea of mixing historical fiction with something a little less than accurate has been done before so many times that it almost seems silly to try to mention all of the work that came before Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. Fictionalized historical fiction has become its own sub-genre. And like any thriving sub-genre, it has its good moments and its bad ones too.
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