By Danny Bloom
CHIAYI CITY, TAIWAN — The things you learn when you aren’t even looking anything up. Here I was reading the newspaper the other day about some new movie called Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter based on a novel by some American novelist named Seth Grahame-Smith, and I had no idea the dude was Jewish. Then I dawned on me: his birth name was Seth Jared Greenberg, born in 1976 and grew up in Connecticut suburbs, went to Emerson College in Boston and now he’s not only the talk of the town, he’s the toast of Hollywood, too. Who knew?
The name change? His parents divorced, and his mom for some odd reason changed Seth’s surname to “Grahame” — thinking of the famous author Kenneth Grahame — and later added the surname “Smith” from her re-marriage for a hyphenated name. Seth Grahame-Smith currently resides in Los Angeles with his wife, Erin, and their son, Joshua.
So what’s ‘Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter‘ all about. Go see the movie, but for now, I hear the book traces Lincoln’s life from his childhood through his assassination, relying upon so-called “secret diaries” to reveal his central role in a world-wide struggle against vampirism. When asked about how he got the idea for the novel, Grahame-Smith told a reporter in Taiwan via email that he got the idea for the novel in 2009, which was the bicentennial of Lincoln’s birth. He said that every bookstore he went into those days, had two huge book displays — one table had books about Lincoln, and the other table had the famous book about vampires titled Twilight.
“I just thought I’d put them together,” Grahame-Smith told the reporter in Taipei, adding: “Here was a man, Lincoln, who battled tragedy after tragedy throughout his life.”
The movie’s in theaters nationwide now and showing overseas as well. According to Lin Yuting in Taiwan, the movie “explores the secret life of the 16th president of the United States, bringing audiences a fresh take on the blood-thirsty lore of the vampire by imagining Lincoln as history’s greatest hunter of the undead.”
And the author of this mishugas is Jewish.
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Bloom is Taiwan bureau chief for San Diego Jewish World and an inveterate surfer of the web. He may be contacted at dan.bloom@sdjewishworld.com