Abraham Lincoln vs. Zombies 2012

Abraham Lincoln grows up in a world where horror collides with history. When his mother Nancy Lincoln turns into a zombie, the ten-year-old boy witnesses a devastating sight: his father Thomas Lincoln kills himself at her bedside. In a moment of raw resolve, he seizes a scythe and decapitates his mother, an act that shards his childhood and pushes him into a grim duty. He then joins others in his community to contain a local zombie outbreak, learning at a young age that danger can arrive from the most intimate places.

As time passes, an adult Abraham Lincoln sits atop a fractured nation, steering a fragile republic through the wreckage of civil strife. Rumors swirl about a Confederate stronghold, a fortress that might tilt the balance of power: Fort Pulaski. A regiment of thirty men descended into the fortress, only one returned alive, and that survivor bears a frightening illness that seems to drain life from corpses and bring them back to an undead state. In questioning the lone survivor, Lincoln discovers a chilling mechanism for infection—blood, bites, scratches, and even exposure to infected blood in the eyes or mouth can spread the contagion, turning people within a day from “human” to something else. To confront this crisis, he forms a newly established secret service and personally leads the investigation into the fort.

Upon reaching Fort Pulaski, the team is assaulted by a chorus of threats: Confederate survivors led by General Stonewall Jackson and a host of infected attackers. The encounter earns hard losses, including the moment when Lincoln is forced to shoot a man who has been bitten, a grim reminder of the personal costs of their mission. He lays out the rules to his wary party: contact with infected blood, bites, or scratches will transmit the infection, and the clock runs fast—twenty-four hours before one’s humanity erodes. To complicate matters, an encounter with a familiar face deepens the emotional stakes: Mary Owens, an old flame who has become a sheltering mother figure to a group including a young Theodore Roosevelt (a figure mentioned in the narrative) and his daughter Sophia, along with a prostitute named Annika who protects them from the invasion.

The group returns to the fort only to face a stubborn moral divide. General Stonewall Jackson refuses to kill the infected, insisting they are merely sick and deserving of care; his stance clashes with Lincoln’s hard-won resolve to contain the threat. Lincoln’s team names the infected “zombies,” a term derived from an old Bantu word learned by Lincoln from his mother and adopted as a clinical label for the crisis at hand. In the effort to fortify their defenses, Wilson Brown, an ally on the ground, helps navigate the terrain, while Pat Garrett steps forward to support Lincoln. He leads the pair to a nearby plantation stocked with farming tools and other weapons, a crucial swing of odds in their struggle.

Back at the fort, tragedy intensifies: Mary is splashed with zombie blood and quickly falls ill, forcing the others to press onward with a heavier sense of urgency. Wilkinson protests the killing and begs to stay behind as the others venture into the township to scour the infected. Outnumbered and outmatched, only Abraham Lincoln, the young Theodore Roosevelt, and Sophia manage to return; Wilkinson, revealed as a spy, contemplates killing Lincoln but relents after seeing him in prayer, a moment that unsettles him and reframes his loyalties. With a cloak of desperation closing in, Stonewall reveals a secret cache of gunpowder, and the plan to trap and blow up the fort solidifies. The fuse falters, and Stonewall sacrifices himself to relight it, dying at the hands of the encroaching horde. Abe and Brown narrowly escape as the fort is engulfed in flame, and Mary accepts her fate, choosing to die beside Lincoln, a heartbreak that deepens Sophia’s sorrow.

Eighteen months pass, and Lincoln makes a hopeful, yet fatal, visit to Mary, who remains in the care of those seeking a cure for the illness. As he tends to her wounds, she scratches his skin, infecting him with the same contagion that has haunted their world. Realizing he is incurable, Lincoln asks for a message to be sent to John Wilkinson—a man who, it is revealed, is actually [John Wilkes Booth] in disguise, a plot woven in the shadows of conflict and revenge. The message contains critical intelligence that Booth can use to locate Lincoln the following night at the theater, a chilling prelude to the assassination that Lincoln, in a grim calculus, arranges to prevent further catastrophe by ending the cycle of violence before it can spread again. The story closes on this cataclysmic reckoning, tying a man’s moral burden to a nation’s fate.

“If they are bitten or scratched by an infected person, or if an infected person’s blood makes contact with their mouths or eyes, that they too will become infected and, within twenty-four hours, would no longer be considered ‘human’.”

This rendition of Lincoln’s journey blends a grief-stricken childhood with a chilling, pandemic-style crisis set against a divided United States. The narrative threads through personal loss, political duty, and a stubborn insistence on preserving humanity in the face of an unthinkable threat. The film balances intimate moments—unspoken bonds between Lincoln and those he cares about, the fragile alliances with allies like Wilson Brown and Pat Garrett—with sprawling, action-driven sequences at Fort Pulaski and beyond. It preserves core themes of leadership, sacrifice, and the heavy cost of making impossible choices when the line between ally and enemy, friend and foe, becomes dangerously blurred.