Burton Goes From "Alice" to "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter"

Tim Burton has never been one to rest on his laurels, so it comes as no surprise that even as his latest film, Alice in Wonderland has raced to an astonishing $116.1 million in it's opening weekend, the quirky film director has already set his heavy-lidded gaze on his next off-the-wall project. So, move over Buffy, you have some serious competition. Meet Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.

Burton has optioned the rights to Seth Grahame-Smith's novel of the same name, and is re-teaming with 9 (the animated film not the musical) director Timur Bekmambetov to bring the fictional history of America's 16th president as the scourge of the undead to the big screen. If depicting the Great Emancipator as a bounty hunter of blood suckers is wrong, then quite simply, we don't want to be right.

In a media world inundated with the tired sagas of pigment-challenged and unforgivably plaintive night walkers with pointy teeth, it's high time that those of us with an actual beating heart had a champion of our own. These are dark times, and we are continually subjected to the whims of this increasingly tiresome section of the undead, with their monolithically boring high school routines and romances, their "diaries," their "weekends," and their stilted and painful attempts at Louisiana charm. Who among us wouldn't want to see Honest Abe go toe-to-toe with Robert Pattinson?

Grahame-Smith's book depicts Lincoln as an axe-wielding vampire hunter bent on revenge on the group of Vampyre that killed his mother. An absurd premise to some, but let us not be so quick to dismiss this as a "mash-up" of historical fiction and horror. Let us be bold enough to call this a "historical possibility." Big Abe was a 6' 4" stud in a time when the average height for men was just above uncut grass. In his early days, he was by an accomplished lawyer, skilled with an axe, as well as an renowned wrestler (back when wrestling was a man's sport, free of spandex and terms like "smack-down"). His mother, Nancy Hanks, died when he was nine-years old of a mysterious illness called "milk sickness" which is characterized by trembling, vomiting, and intestinal pain.

Okay, so it's more than a stretch of the imagination but, in that very sense, it could not be in better hands than in those of Burton, and Bekmambetov. That being said, in the off chance that the duo decides to take a more campy avenue, we've come up with a few Honest Abe tag lines that we thought may be fitting of one of the greatest American president/vampire hunters to ever live:

"Consider yourself emancipated... from this world."

"I'm about to go Gettysburg on your ass."

"Sorry, but I have to split." (only said after cutting a vampire in half with axe)

"Of the people, by the people, for the people... But you're not people."

"Do you know what a log cabin is made of? Really big wooden stakes...."

"Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of my foot in your ass."

Photo by Carniphage via Flickr, photo by Believe Collective via Flickr.