For this year’s 31 Nights of Horror Challenge, the Day 19 prompt is Underrated Dracula. We watched the movie, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter on Amazon Prime.
Storyline
At the age of 9, Abraham Lincoln witnesses his mother being killed by a vampire, Jack Barts. Some 10 years later, he unsuccessfully tries to eliminate Barts but in the process makes the acquaintance of Henry Sturgess who teaches him how to fight and what is required to kill a vampire. The quid pro quo is that Abe will kill only those vampires that Henry directs him to. Abe relocates to Springfield where he gets a job as a store clerk while he studies the law and kills vampires by night. He also meets and eventually marries the pretty Mary Todd. Many years later as President of the United States, he comes to realize that vampires are fighting with the Confederate forces. As a result he mounts his own campaign to defeat them.
Our Thoughts on Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2012)
We took some liberties on the prompt and chose this film because it is just so over the top corny and bad but like a good horror should be, good clean fun.
It has a decent story with a lot of history thrown in for good measure. The horse scene is by far the best!
4 out of 10
Trivia
Benjamin Walker trained to be able to do a lot of his own stunt work with an axe.
In real life, Abraham Lincoln was considered the best Greco Roman wrestler of his day, winning over 300 matches. Only one loss is known: on April 22, 1832, Lincoln was thrown in two straight falls by Lorenzo Dow “Hank” Thompson during a wrestling match in Beardstown, Illinois. Otherwise, he was undefeated.
President Lincoln works at a large Oval Office desk while his son Willie plays with toys beneath it. The scene is based on an iconic photograph of President John F. Kennedy and little John Kennedy Jr.
Shipped to the cinema with codename “Bloody Honest”.
The film holds the world record for the highest hpm (horses per minute) of any film ever produced (at time of writing). This was never supposed to be the case, but an intern working on the horse CGI team misunderstood an assignment and accidentally coded 1.6 million horses in the scene instead of 16.