"So long as this country is cursed with slavery, so too will it be cursed with vampires."

We like Lincoln these days, almost unreservedly—a President who, in his lifetime, was vilified by many, regularly threatened, and ultimately assassinated by a Confederate sympathizer and not, as it happens, by a vampire. We imagine him depressed, haunted by a lost love, gay, even on the deck of the starship Enterprise. What, then, to make of this moment of the Vampire Hunter—of the idea of the President as someone who not only has to dispatch armies and make speeches but drive a stake through a vampire heart with his own two hands? (The voiceover for the trailer makes this point explicitly.) One could, perhaps, argue that drones are the new stakes, and that we see Presidents as the new superheroes.