Day 14

What We Do In Shadows (2014)

Directed (and starring) Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement

What We Do In The Shadows is a movie, and now also a TV show, that is a mockumentary about several vampires living in a New Zealand flat (apartment in American speak) together for environmental and economic reasons. The film is a comedic take on both this group of vampires and also supernatural life(?) as a whole in New Zealand, where we meet the local population of werewolves, witches, and zombies. I’ll be right to the point with this one, What We Do In The Shadows is hysterical, we started laughing in the opening scene and kept laughing straight through the end of the movie, whereupon we seriously considered watching the movie again because that’s how funny it was. The only times when we weren’t laughing were when Waititi and Clement reminded us that this was still in the horror genre during a shockingly tense sequence towards the end of the film.

What makes this movie so funny is how well Waititi and Clement understand vampire lore, and how much they clearly love it. The vampires we meet are all representative of a certain style of vampire which they excellently skewer: Waititi plays Viago Von Dorna Schmarten Scheden Heimburg (né von Blitzenberg), the foppish aristocrat obsessed with order and cleanliness, Clement plays Vladislav the Poker, a tortured vampire with a dark past and mysterious enemy, Jonathan Brugh plays Deacon Brucke, the youngest and coolest of the group, and Ben Fransham plays Petyr, the Noseferatu-like vampire who lives in the basement. All these people have strong personalities which lends itself incredibly well to the way the movie satirizes the mundane aspects of what an immortal life as a vampire would be, as well as connecting that to the experiences that everyday people have. This is a hilarious movie that will especially work for people who are familiar with vampire fiction, and as an added bonus the ending is weirdly upbeat, heartfelt, and hopeful. 100% recommended to anyone who likes horror or comedy.