Seth Grahame-Smith’s screenplay adapts his own novel, featuring the future 16th President of the United States as a 19th century Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Turns out the undead are the minds behind the slave trade and use their human chattel as fast food; without vamps, there wouldn’t have been a Civil War. This sounds like comedy, but the movie takes itself very seriously. I’m happy to blame vampires for a disproportionate percentage of the lamest fiction of the last decade, but slavery? Can you imagine anyone getting away with a movie that suggested the herding of Jews into concentration camps was about providing vampires with easy targets?