Hi all, and welcome to your surprise bonus post! Weren’t expecting this, were you? (Yes you were, I put it in the announcement and this was a test to see if you read that far). Expected or not, get ready to laugh, love, and damage property with my personal favorite vampires of all time, the Staten Island Vampires of What We Do In The Shadows! Happy reading, stay spooky, and go to your local library! 🦇🏳️‍🌈🔪🩸

Vampire media has never been afraid of asking the big questions. Is love eternal? Does immortality corrupt by definition? Are all vampires a metaphor for queerness? For grief? Is undeath better than the alternative? Are vampires to be feared, revered, or some secret third thing? From Dracula to The Lost Boys to Sinners, vampires have been vessels for all sorts of moral, ethical, and existential dilemmas relating to everything from race to identity to culture. But there is only one piece of media I can think of that asks the real, hard-hitting question that has the potential to change the cultural perception of vampires forever: What if they were stupid?

What We Do In The Shadows was initially a mockumentary style horror comedy movie from Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi, and is now better known as a hit horror comedy TV show, starring Kayvan Novak (Nandor), Matt Berry (Laszlo), Natasia Demetriou (Nadja), and Harvey Guillen (Guillermo). In it, Harvey Guillen’s Guillermo serves as a familiar to Kayvan Novak’s Nandor the Relentless, desperate to be turned into a vampire as well. On the surface, it would seem very similar to Interview With The Vampire, except for with a few main differences. Namely, that it’s basically a vampire sitcom. Some vampires are blessed with the wisdom and riches of the ages, living in stately mansions or castles. These vampires are decidedly stupid, kind of poor, and living in a run-down former mansion in Staten Island. They stumble their way through pretending to be human, get into inconsequential spats about the state of the mansion, various relationship difficulties, vampire social events, cursed hats, modern technology…oh, and the fact that Guillermo is, by blood, a vampire hunter.

Many vampire narratives are reliant on either a sire and baby vampire dynamic, or a vampire hunter and vampire dynamic. WWDITS stands out because it manages to incorporate both of them in the same relationship, and then some extra in the surrounding characters. Nandor and Guillermo’s relationship was already tense as vampire and familiar who wants to be turned, but that tension skyrockets with the reveal the Guillermo has Van Helsing blood, as is a vampire hunter by birthright. Laszlo and Nadja’s relationship is often played for laughs - a comic Morticia and Gomez Addams if they were vampires, if you will - but eternity is a very long time for any relationship. The WWDITS vampires may be funny in their mundanity, but they are also profound. They show that immortality and vampirism doesn’t actually take away from humanity. These vampires are petty and jealous. They struggle with romance and are far too easily manipulated. They get in fights over silly little things, and miss their home countries that no longer exist, and can’t host parties for the undeath of them. The true mastery of What We Do In The Shadows isn’t just in its subversion of vampire tropes, or its homages paid to famous vamps throughout history, but in its mundanity.

In this day and age, most people can’t relate to castles in Transylvania and generational wealth. But what they can relate to is slightly run-down house in Staten Island and the inability to pay taxes. For so long, a main tenet of vampire mythos has been wealth. I even wrote about it in the first ever Spooky Season Spooktacular. Vampires are rich, almost by definition. Count Dracula, Lestat de Lioncourt, Count Orlok, you name the vampire, they’ve got the money. Exceptions to this rule started creeping in in the eighties, with more blue-collar vamps slinking their way onto screens, but even those vampires had something extra to them. Something exciting outside of the fact of their existence. They had presence, atmosphere, renown. The Staten Island vamps of WWDITS do not have that. They have regular human problems that are also specific to vampires, like the fact that the blood sprinklers in their nightclub keeping clogging because blood isn’t actually great for that, or their roommate is the most boring creature alive. WWDITS posits a world where vampires walk among us, but not in the way The Lost Boys does. The world of WWDITS is one where the most boring guy in your office is literally feeding on your energy, and vampires are trying to enroll the reincarnated spirit of their old roommate into your private school and failing miserably. They hypnotize people, but only because they suck so bad at pretending to be human that it’s sort of a necessity, and they forgot their wallet anyway. So I was not exaggerating when I said that WWDITS and its stupid, stupid vampires had the potential to change vampire media forever. Because what Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi did in 2015 was they took vampires and made them for the people.

For a very long time, vampires have been sort of inaccessible. And I don’t mean that Dracula is a classic and so is a little difficult to read, or that Fright Night is impossible to find on streaming. I mean that vampires have been high, lofty, and powerful villains - or at least antiheroes - since the very beginning of stories that were told about them. WWDITS took that script and flipped it, with vampires that are really objectively awful, but so bad at it that you can’t help but root for them anyway. It gave vampires cults and councils and bureaucracy and all of its paperwork. It let them be messy, let them fuck up their relationships, let the familiar be the most powerful, violent, and messed up one there and still love them enough to stay and make sure they were alright. It may be a comedy, and a raunchy, bloody, slapstick one at that, but What We Do In The Shadows is also one of the most important pieces of vampire media of the last decade both in terms of representation, and interpretation of the established vampire mythos. So next time you have a fight with your roommates, or have to jump through bureaucratic hoops, or struggle with a new relationship, just think: What would Nandor, Nadja, Laszlo, Colin, or Guillermo do? And then proceed to do the exact opposite.

Thanks for reading all! The Spooktacular starts in earnest on Monday, and I hope to see you all there! Happy reading, stay spooky, and don’t get turned! 🦇🏳️‍🌈🔪🩸