Tags
Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter, Benjamin Walker, Book of Secrets, Diane Kruger, Historical Fiction, Jon Turteltaub, Justin Bartha, National Treasure, Nicholas Cage, Seth Grahame-Smith, Tim Burton, Vampire
The REAL Abraham Lincoln … Vampire Hunter
History prefers legends to men … It prefers nobility to brutality … soaring speeches to quiet deeds. History remembers the battle and forgets the blood. However history remembers me before I was a President, it shall only remember a fraction of the truth … [from the trailer below]
The premise of Seth Grahame-Smith’s bestselling novel, Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter, is awesome. Somehow though, I never got around to reading it. So when the movie came out, I had to see it. It was obvious from the trailers that the story was anything but a joke. Still, I couldn’t fathom how — given everything we know about our 16th President — the history could be believable. OK, so you have to buy into the whole Vampire’s-are-real thing. But after that … Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter is disturbingly plausible.
Which got me to thinking … What if? What if … what we’ve been taught about that time in history is only part of the truth? The possibility is awesome.
Hollywood has given us some other more-than-believable options for American history…
A Secret National Treasure Map
National Treasure is a perfect example … A secret from our nation’s past leads to the greatest adventure (and treasure) in history.
Benjamin Gates’ (Nicolas Cage) life-long journey leads him, and his nerd-savante sidekick Riley Poole (Justin Bartha), to an invisible map that is encrypted on the back of the Declaration of Independence. However, what they thought was the final clue turns out to only be the beginning of their hunt.
Gates soon realizes that to protect the world’s greatest treasure, he must steal the most revered, best guarded document in American history before it falls into the wrong hands. In a race against time, Gates must stay one step ahead of his ruthless adversary (Sean Bean), elude the authorities, and unlock a 2000 year-old mystery behind our greatest national treasure.
What makes this story so believable are the historical facts that are woven into the story at every turn. Nine of the Founding Fathers who signed the Declaration of Independence were Masons. The invisible map (encrypted using Masonic symbols) points to the hiding place of King Solomon’s treasure — an unfathomable storehouse of wealth — that vanished after the Knights Templar (precursors to the Masons) uncovered it beneath King Solomon’s palace.
And let’s not forget the clue Gates discovers on the Independence Hall clock tower on the back of a hundred-dollar bill,
or the special glasses needed to read the map — made by Benjamin Franklin himself, the inventor of bifocals — that are hidden in that very clock tower. And the final believability gem (pun intended) comes when Gates realizes the treasure is deep beneath Trinity Church (Trinity Wall Street at 79th Street in Lower Manhattan), which was founded in 1696. Again, the magic of … what if?
More National Treasure … in a Book of Secrets
National Treasure: Book of Secrets starts out with the promise of a great premise…
This time Benjamin Gates sets out to discover the truth behind the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, by uncovering the mystery within the 18 pages missing from assassin John Wilkes Booth’s diary. A Gates ancestor has been accused of being an accomplice in Booth’s crime, and Benjamin believes the missing pages will clear the family name. His conviction drives him to uncover clues to the location of the mythical City of Gold, Cibola.
The historic facts laced throughout this story are viable. Such as the hidden inscription on the scale model of the Statue of Liberty on the Île aux Cygnes in Paris that points to the two Resolute desks; one of which is in the Queen’s chambers in Buckingham Palace, the other in the Oval Office of the White House. All well and good. But they lost me with the Mayan-style temple of gold beneath Mount Rushmore.
It might just be me. But the only way I’d believe that one is if they proved George Washington used his hatchet to cut crop circles to signal aliens (instead of chopping down that cherry tree). Because the aliens could totally have helped the Mayans build a temple of gold beneath Mount Rushmore. Which of course, is why George’s face is now on that mountain.
But seriously … a city carved into the walls at the bottom of the Grand Canyon — similar to Petra in Jordan — and filled with tons of golden artifacts would have been much more believable. I’m just sayin’. Are you listening, Jon Turteltaub?
I’m hoping National Treasure 3 — if and when it happens — brings the series back on track to its original suspense filled, believable glory. Without aliens, crystal skulls, or nuked refrigerators. Please!
How to lose an audience…
What I learned from these stories was … to keep a story believable the audience needs a consistent trail of plausibility that’s easy to follow. A logical set up of known historical facts woven throughout the story so they pay off in a believable secret history.
Let’s face it. On some level we all want to believe the secret history could be true. We want to believe, because it takes us out of our day-to-day lives and lifts us up into realm of infinite possibilities. That … What if? … place, where anything can happen.
A storyteller’s mistake comes when their plausibility trail hits a wall that requires us to pole vault over it. The end result … you lose us … an audience that wanted to go along for the ride, not go out for the Olympics.
What’s your favorite piece of secret history … American or otherwise?
Inquiring minds want to know!
Elizabeth Fais 
Ah, the possibilities, the fodder for fiction, or is it? Only the shadows of the past know for sure. (Abe the Slayer rocked.)
Oh yeah, Abe the Slayer definitely rocked. 😉
I really loved the first National Treasure movie and like you, didn’t enjoy the second one as much. I’m curious about the Lincoln movie, though. I think so much is left out of the history narratives we’re fed in school that anything’s possible. The real historical accounts (in my opinion) are in the stories of the locals whose families have lived in a particular region for generations. Someone needs to do a series of regional U.S. history books on that. I would eat that up. 🙂
You are so right. My grandmother, who lived her entire adult life in Spencer, Iowa, had great stories about locals who were in the Civil War, etc. As time goes on, I am more interested in the everyday people and the extraordinary things they accomplished (but we never hear about because they’re not famous). There is a wealth of regional history that’s waiting to be mined.
It wasn’t that I disliked National Treasure 2. I really “wanted” to like it. That’s why I felt cheated when they played the Mayan-temple-of-gold-beneath-Mt-Rushmore card. The term for that type of over-the-top faux pax is Jumping the Shark (or Nuking the Fridge).
I’m interested in seeing Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, although I was disappointed by the trailer. They obviously went for a young Abe before he became president. I would much prefer a vampire hunter movie featuring the iconic Lincoln with the black hat and scruffy beard and everything. In fact, the story could postulate that rather than dying in that theater as history records, Lincoln faked his own assassination because he had to answer a higher calling–that of vampire hunting. It’s a missed opportunity, in my opinion.
Movie still looks like it might be fun, though.
Yeah, they started with Abe as a young boy to set up his obsession with hunting vampires (his mother was killed by one in the story), and then his path to being trained to hunt by the vampire named Henry. The movie ends as Abe is going to the fateful play. Right before he leaves the White House, his vampire friend who trained him to hunt asks Abe if he can make him immortal, so they can hunt together for eternity. Abe’s response was that “there are some things more important than immortality” (I think that’s right). I haven’t read the book, so I don’t know if the author left an opening for further development. I LOVE your suggestion of Abe faking his assassination, so he can continue the hunt. That would be an awesome story, one I’d definitely want to read.
Sounds like it delivers entertainment. I’ll have to check it out sometime.
Quite often the ‘secrets’ of history actually aren’t – we get misled bywhat’s popularly known as received truth. I keep running into that in New Zealand and the stuff I write.
But ‘what if’ history can be fun as entertainment, even so – providing it’s got some modicum of believability.
Interesting. So, are the ‘secrets’ you’re coming across in real history things that were just ‘left out’ or ‘covered up’ for some reason? Sounds quite intriguing.
I’ve never found anything deliberately ‘covered up’ in New Zealand history – indeed, the local academic historical community hate each other with such vicious intensity that if one tried to deliberately deceive, they’d be reduced to mincemeat by the others even faster than is usually the case.
But there is a lot of popularly held mythology about New Zealand’s past which isn’t actually true – and when the documentary evidence is hauled out, there is often a surprise in it. The whole lot is on public record, even online – the challenge is digging through the sheer volume. Without being too shamelessly commercial, Penguin have just published a book of mine on one thoroughly documented aspect of New Zealand’s ‘hidden’ past (not secret, just little considered). But the more interesting experience, for me, was the time I published a feature in a national magazine about one of New Zealand’s founding documents, well known in the historical community for what it is – but popularly misconstrued. There is no question about the documentary backing for what I said. However, one reader disbelieved it and suggested my article was a fresh chapter from a science fiction history book of mine that Penguin had published a few years earlier. Can’t fault them too much – at least they’d read the thing (it tanked badly, commercially). One of the official government historians backed up what I’d said, when the magazine asked him – but of course, I’d been quite conservative and thoroughly sourced in what i’d said.
I would guess that what you say is pretty much true in America too. The fellow who wrote “Devil in the White City”–the story about a serial killer and the Chicago World’s Fair–used facts that were readily available to anyone. Hut he was the first to put all the facts together and tell them in a narrative form. I doubt there is any real secret American history, beyond the “what if” variety developed by Hollywood and in popular fiction. I enjoy the creativity of those stories, and appreciate the pains the author or screenwriter goes to to find the right facts make their work plausible. I think the real wealth of “hidden” American history is associated with small towns and the families who’ve lived there for generations. If someone took the time to gather that information and pull it all together, I think we’d be amazed.
I believe you when you say that your article was well documented and verified by respectable sources. Some people get very upset when you shatter their belief systems, especially when they are presented with absolute facts. I’ll have to check out your book. New Zealand’s “hidden history” sounds quite intriguing.