“ABRAHAM LINCOLN WAS A WOMAN!” In 2002, a cover story in The Weekly World News reported that a cache of Mathew Brady daguerreotypes of “Babe-raham Lincoln” had been found in the basement of the White House, and hidden among the president’s effects at the Smithsonian was a telltale box of sanitary napkins. Lincoln, it was disclosed, had married a man (“Take a look at a photo of Mary Todd Lincoln and you’ll be convinced”) and given birth to six children. All this, however, is ho-hum compared with the revelations in the coming film “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter,” in which our 16th president is, basically, Buffy in a stovepipe hat.

The film is an adaptation of a novel by Seth Grahame-Smith. Mr. Grahame-Smith’s first book was an illustrated encyclopedia called “The Big Book of Porn.” A few years later, he published the best-selling “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies,” in which Mr. Darcy delights in vanquishing the undead. “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter” came out in 2010, right after the 200th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth and just in time for the 150th anniversary of his election.

Lincoln sells. Vampires sell. It’s a twofer. Still, you couldn’t pull this off with just any old president. “Probably it wouldn’t work with ‘F.D.R.: Vampire Hunter,’” the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lincoln biographer Eric Foner told me.

Let’s face it: it helps that Lincoln looks like Frankenstein. Plus, he’s got that ax.

Mr. Grahame-Smith’s novel chronicles “the hidden history of vampires in America,” as revealed in Lincoln’s secret diary, and proves that vampires are responsible for nearly everything bad that has ever happened in American history — every murder, every slaughter — except that vampires helped Americans win the Revolutionary War (Give me liberty and give me death), fighting alongside the minutemen, because they needed a country where they could be free to live off the Africans they kept in chains, as zombies.