What We Do In The Shadows is the story of Viago, Deacon, Vladislav, and Petyr, four flatmates in Queensland, New Zealand trying to work through all the issues that flatmates have: house chores, annoying habits, Learning about Facebook. Oh, and by the way, they are all vampires. We follow a documentary crew as we see their trials and tribulations dealing with the ordinary mundacity of life in the big city.
What We Do In The Shadows was created by the men behind Flight of the Concordes on HBO and follows a similar tone. While they are not following the annoying “too cool for school” approach from their TV show, they approach the subject matter with a very amusing matter-of-fact style. It follows the mockumentary style of This Is Spinal Tap andCrocodile Hunter: Collision Course, It also takes on the very difficult to pull off meta style of humor. This movie pulled it off brillaintly following acts like: Young Frankenstein, Evil Dead III: Army Of Darkness, Scream, Sean Of The Dead, Hot Fuzz, Cabin In The Woods, and Tucker And Dale Versus Evil. The true brilliance of this film is how it totally skewers the pomposity of the vampire myth, perpetuated in Dracula, Interview With The Vampire, and the Underworld series. Whenever a story of vampires is told, they are all French or Russian aristocrats. While the HBO show Tru Blood did this a little, making vampires backwoods rednecks, but a lot of the overwrought tropes were there as well. It seems vampires are always young, haughty and rich fops, never normal people.
What I liked particularly about the film is the actual delivery of the humor. While there is a lot of over the top stuff, the funniest jokes are often very subtle digs at all parts of vampire mythology, with a little werewolf and zombie fun thrown in. Americans seem to have a hard time with this, usually jamming humor down your throat while waving their arms and saying, “Look! We’re being funny!” Good examples are anything starring Will Ferrell or Steve Carrell or the Madea and Scary Movie franchises. While these can occasionally have good jokes, they tend to be the theater of the overly absurd. If you are not a fan of the horror genre, particularly vampires, this is not the movie for you. For those of you who love the unneutered vampire films before such dreck aimed at the teenage market like the Twilight series came out, you will love this film. It is a lot of fun.
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