Alan Tudyk (Firefly) will play Stephen A. Douglas in Timur Bekmambetov's 3D adaptation of Seth Grahame-Smith's Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.  The book imagines our 16th President had a secret life fighting vampires and that was the real reason for the Civil War.  In the history books, Douglas was opposite Lincoln on the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 which helped to raise Lincoln's national profile.  In the Vampire Hunter, Douglas is recast as an "ally of the Southern vampires," because the only thing that's worse than vampires, are pro-slavery vampires.

Tudyk joins a cast that includes Benjamin Walker, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Anthony Mackie, Dominic Cooper, Jimmi Simpson, and Robin McLeavy.  Hit the jump for a synopsis of the novel.  Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is due out June 22, 2012.

Here’s the synopsis of Seth Grahame-Smith’s novel, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter:

Indiana, 1818. Moonlight falls through the dense woods that surround a one-room cabin, where a nine-year-old Abraham Lincoln kneels at his suffering mother’s bedside. She’s been stricken with something the old-timers call “Milk Sickness.”

“My baby boy…” she whispers before dying.

Only later will the grieving Abe learn that his mother’s fatal affliction was actually the work of a vampire.

When the truth becomes known to young Lincoln, he writes in his journal, “henceforth my life shall be one of rigorous study and devotion. I shall become a master of mind and body. And this mastery shall have but one purpose…” Gifted with his legendary height, strength, and skill with an ax, Abe sets out on a path of vengeance that will lead him all the way to the White House.

While Abraham Lincoln is widely lauded for saving a Union and freeing millions of slaves, his valiant fight against the forces of the undead has remained in the shadows for hundreds of years. That is, until Seth Grahame-Smith stumbled upon The Secret Journal of Abraham Lincoln, and became the first living person to lay eyes on it in more than 140 years.

Using the journal as his guide and writing in the grand biographical style of Doris Kearns Goodwin and David McCullough, Seth has reconstructed the true life story of our greatest president for the first time-all while revealing the hidden history behind the Civil War and uncovering the role vampires played in the birth, growth, and near-death of our nation. [Amazon]