SPRINGFIELD ——
When we last left Seth Grahame-Smith, the 34-year-old author of “The Big Book of Porn” and “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” was the toast of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, sheepishly accepting congratulations and reiterating how humbled he was by the warm reception. He had a new best-seller, “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter”; Tim Burton had just signed on to produce the movie version; the state historian gave him a personal tour of library archives; and the museum invited him to launch his book tour there. Which he did. Only Doris Kearns Goodwin drew a bigger crowd.
Two years later — welcome to “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter,” the Junket.
This is why I am standing outside Lincoln’s Tomb on a Friday night in February. The ground at Oak Ridge Cemetery is black and snowy and looks as though someone sprinkled powdered sugar over dead grass. It’s just after 9 p.m. and the temperature is 20 degrees and the wind tosses around bare tree branches, casting long, gnarled fingers across the granite tomb, which looks large, round and imposing on such a raw evening.
A tour bus from St. Louis pulls up. This is the press junket.
They represent MTV, Spike, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Chicago Sun-Times, Telemundo, blogs, horror-movie websites. A number of these people are from Los Angeles and not wearing coats — they’re wearing hoodies, windbreakers, sports jackets, T-shirts, skinny jeans, black on black. They’re here to tour the tomb and, later, at the museum, watch a little footage of the movie. A few minutes before they arrive, I chat with Candy Knox, the site superintendent, who has short white hair and a kind of rugged, stomach-no-idiots practicality; she strikes me as someone who might live in a lighthouse. When I ask about the press junket, which is being given a private tour of the Lincoln family crypts — typically off limits to the public — she smiles tightly: “The public doesn’t get to those places for a reason,” she says. “Those are important places, and there’s a lack of reverence in doing this. I do find it a little disrespectful. But, you know, I have a boss.”
Inside, the junket splits into two groups of 15 or so, and Mikel Siere, “site service specialist,” leads us up old metal ladders, into bricked, cramped rooms, over wooden bridges constructed decades ago, and down ladders. At the bottom of one, he nods at a miniature crawl space. And so I crawl, over dirt, broken rocks, beneath a stone arch. I stand and find myself in a crypt. Where everyone is checking their cellphones.
“OK, ladies and gentlemen,” Siere says, “the Lincoln family is buried here.” He means, beneath our feet. Someone stifles a yawn. Someone else checks email on a cellphone. Someone else tweets. “Oh, listen!” he says. We get quiet. After a minute, he says, “Never mind, that was from outside.” Someone asks about vampire stakes. He walks them over to a precipitous drop. At the bottom is a small pile of wood.
“It all comes together,” a woman says.
Someone asks about ghosts. Siere says that if they want ghosts they should go to Springfield High School, which, he adds, is built on top of a cemetery. “Just like in ‘Poltergeist,’” someone says. Yes, he says, just like it. He says that there are no ghosts here, but there were floods long ago and the body of Gov. William Ewing, who died in the 1840s, was washed away and never recovered. We consider this a moment.
But the crypt is cramped and cold and people start crawling over broken chunks of concrete to leave.
“If you want,” he says, watching everyone file out, “go ahead and take a souvenir.”
Outside, at the door of the tomb, I chat with Pam Van Alstine, volunteer coordinator, who tells me, with a mix of irritation and resignation, “You want to be respectful about the history here, but this is a new world.” Then, as if on cue, a blogger asks a movie publicist if there’s going to be any video of the crypt available.
I head to the museum. On Monument Avenue I stop at a red light and check my cellphone, curious what those people were tweeting back there. I learn that a radio personality from Los Angeles tweeted, from inside the tomb: “Chillin with Abraham @ Abraham Lincoln Tomb.” And someone from MTV tweeted: “Dancing on the tomb of Lincoln’s kids.” And a blogger, perhaps with a healthier understanding of shame, tweeted: “They said I could take a rock from President Lincoln’s tomb as a souvenir. Am I cursed now??”
At the museum, I pass though clouds billowing from a smoke machine and into the theater, filled with press who slouch into their seats and zip up their hoodies and check their email. You can tell who’s from Springfield — they’re the ones wearing tan sport coats, sitting upright. After a taped comment from Burton, who is thrilled the museum is on board (“There would be no ‘Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter’ without you”) and wishes he could be here but he’s in London, we watch the trailer twice and about 10 minutes of footage.
Here’s what I learn: Lincoln wields an ax like Buffy worked a stake. Mary Todd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) seems cool. Vampires invented sunscreen. Benjamin Walker, as Lincoln, is a smidge “Smallville.” Vampires fought in the Civil War. And Lincoln, in a sequence that looks pulled from an Andy Samberg short on “Saturday Night Live” — well, Lincoln makes a tree explode with one swing of an ax. (Don’t think of it as a tree, Abe’s mentor says, think of it as “what you hate most in the world,” i.e. vampires.) The film opens June 22.
The lights come up.
Smith, Walker, director Timur Bekmambetov and producer Jim Lemley take the stage and field questions from the audience. Some gleanings: “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter” was shot in New Orleans because “it’s a money thing,” Lemley says, explaining the tax credit for a film production in Louisiana was more substantial than the credit in Illinois (though the actual difference is 5 percentage points, 30 percent in Illinois versus 35 percent in Louisiana). Smith hates “Twilight.” (“Vampires should be beheaded with an ax! Not kissed by tweens!”) Smith has “always thought of this in terms of a superhero origin story.” There will be action figures.
A hand goes up.
It belongs to the woman who had just asked Walker if people ever tell him how much he looks like Abraham Lincoln (they haven’t, but that’s flattering, thanks, Walker replies). The question is for Smith: “If this should take off, do you have any other, like, mythological creatures and famous people in mind for something else?”
“Well,” he says, pauses, then plows forward: “I have a book coming in April about the Three Wise Men.”