What We Do in the Shadows is a mockumentary that joyfully makes fun of the vampire figure.
Viago, Vladislav, Deacon and Petyr live together in a house in the suburbs of Wellington. All four share the same condition: they are vampires, even though they are sometimes of different ages (and morals), between Petyr, who has been bestial for 8,000 years, Vladislav, who was transformed more than 800 years ago, in the middle of the medieval era, Viago, a true aristocrat of 400 years, and Deacon, who is almost 200 years old. At a party where Deacon’s familiar offers them two victims on a platter, one of them, Nick, ends up transformed into a vampire by Petyr. The young man, much more in tune with the times than the other four, will have a hard time being accepted.
I’ve been hearing about this mockumentary for almost a year now, since its first screening at the Sundance festival. Presented as a very successful gritty comedy.
The whole, if several scenes are smiling, did not really convince me. The differences between the four vampires (then the fifth), their daily difficulties as well as the staging of the characteristics of the myth (in particular in its relations with werewolves and other vampire hunters) show a desire to appropriate and divert the figure of the vampire. However, in the mockumentary genre, I was more convinced by Vincent Lannoo’s Vampires, which, with less means, was able to do better (by choosing to dive into the daily life of a family of vampires living in a Belgian suburb). And if we often smile, the gags have a déjà-vu side and struggle to draw more than a smile on the face of those used to the genre.
The figure of the vampire, popularized in literature in 1897 by Bram Stoker’s famous Dracula (which is not, let us emphasize, the first work featuring this creature), has been used in many films. It is often associated with a form of romanticism and treated, in fact, under a rather dark and horrific angle, even if parodies and comical approaches are not lacking; we will quote as an example The Vampire Ball, by Roman Polanski (to which the film we are interested in here refers in the course of a shot), or Vampire did you say vampire? by Tom Holland.
Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi’s approach differs from previous attempts at parody in that, with What We Do in the Shadows, they have proceeded to a particularly radical demythification of the vampire. The film, which takes the form of a mockumentary (a work of fiction borrowing the codes of documentary or reportage), shows us vampires with very human flaws: they are stupid; poor musicians (despite centuries of experience!); clumsy; touchy; proud; brawlers…
The scenes illustrate, one after the other, the grotesque or pathetic facets of the different protagonists. Except for their sharp teeth and their many decades of age, they are nothing more or less than a bunch of fairly stupid losers, and the discrepancy between their perception of themselves, between the canonical image of the vampire and the reality of what they are, constitutes the main comic spring of the film.
The directors and screenwriters exploit this spring well, thanks to the amusing characterization of each character – one of whom refers to the impaler Vlad III, the inspiration for Dracula (Jemaine Clement plays him, with Taika Waititi playing the role of the dandy vampire named Viago).
If this project started from a short film made by the two companions in 2005, Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi have managed to find enough ideas to make the film last. Moreover, What We Do in the Shadows has become a franchise, consisting of two TV series and several short films. A new feature film for the cinema, We’re Wolves (around the figure of the werewolf, which we meet in the film), is in the works.
