Posted by Dale Townshend on June 24, 2012 in News tagged with vampires
This week saw the release of the much-anticipated filmic adaptation of Seth Grahame-Smith’s 2010 novel, Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter. Graham-Smith, author of the notorious mash-up Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, has written the screenplay for Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, and the film has been directed and co-produced by Timur Bekmambetov the the master of dark cinema, Tim Burton. For a trailer and a review of the film by the British film critic Mark Kermode, click here.
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About the Author – Dale Townshend
Dale Townshend has written 86 articles on The Gothic Imagination.
Although my particular field of research is British Gothic writing (romances; chapbooks; drama; poetry) of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, I am also interested in manifestations of the Gothic mode well beyond this temporal and geographical limit. My other research interests lie in the general field of critical theory, but with a particular focus upon French poststructuralism (Roland Barthes; Michel Foucault; Jacques Lacan; Jacques Derrida; Julia Kristeva; Gilles Deleuze; Felix Guattari) and its legacies in more contemporary European theorists such as Slavoj Zizek and Giorgio Agamben. Some recent publications include four volumes, co-edited with Fred Botting, in the Gothic: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies series (London: Routledge, 2004); a monograph The Orders of Gothic: Foucault, Lacan, and the Subject of Gothic Writing,1764–1820 (New York: AMS, 2007); “The Haunted Nursery, 1764-1830,” an essay on the Gothic in children’s literature of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth centuries published in The Gothic in Children’s Literature: Haunting the Borders, edited by Anna Jackson, Karen Coats and Roderick McGillis (New York: Routledge, 2007); and a scholarly edition of Mary Anne Radcliffe’s 1809 Gothic romance Manfroné: Or, The One-Handed Monk (Chicago: Valancourt Books, 2007). Forthcoming publications include Gothic Shakespeares, a collection of critical essays co-edited with John Drakakis (Routledge, 2008) and a chapter entitled “‘Love in a Convent’: Or, Gothic and the Perverse Father of Queer Enjoyment” in Queering the Gothic, edited by William Hughes and Andrew Smith (Manchester University Press, 2008).
I’m beginning to think that I’m one of only two people who actually loved ALVH (the other being the person who saw it with me.) After reading a couple of reviews, I was left wondering two things: 1 – if the reviewers had seen the same movie I had and 2 – if they even bothered to read the book. I get the feeling that they (the reviewers) were expecting it to be extremely tongue-in-cheek or campy (which it wasn’t either, really – and since I didn’t find the book to be so, there’s no reason the movie should have been) based solely on the title. Overall, I found it to be visually stunning and had some of the best cinematography I’ve seen in a long while. It didn’t take itself too seriously despite its lack of camp – it was a straightforward story that didn’t resort to cheap laughs and for that I was immensely grateful, especially after having seen the travesty that was Dark Shadows.