What We Do in the Shadows
2014 · Jemaine Clement, Taika Waititi
Vampire housemates try to cope with the complexities of modern life and show a newly turned hipster some of the perks of being undead.
dir. Jemaine Clement, Taika Waititi · 2014
Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi's mockumentary about vampire flatmates in Wellington is the rare comedy whose premise — centuries-old immortals bickering over dish duty — is actually the least of its riches. Shot largely improvised from a story outline, with the cast mining some 125 hours of footage for the driest possible line readings, it applies the deadpan house style of New Zealand comedy (the lineage of Flight of the Conchords) to the entire archive of vampire cinema: Nosferatu, Lost Boys leather, Interview with the Vampire ruffles, each lovingly reproduced on a shoestring by a crew doing practical wirework and in-camera transformations. The mockumentary form, so often a crutch, here becomes the joke's engine — the camera operators wear crucifixes, and the polite awkwardness of documentary etiquette collides with the undead's ancient grievances. Its afterlife has been enormous: an American series that ran for six acclaimed seasons, the cop spinoff Wellington Paranormal, and a permanent elevation of Waititi to Hollywood's front rank. The werewolves ('not swearwolves') remain among the great throwaway inventions of modern comedy.
Lines of influence
- Nosferatu (1922) — Petyr is a direct waxwork of Max Schreck's Count Orlok — rat-fanged, bald, taloned — reviving silent-era practical prosthetics and rigid undead posture instead of the suave-vampire tradition.
- This Is Spinal Tap (1984) — Sets the mockumentary grammar the film runs on: sit-down confessional interviews intercut with fly-on-the-wall vérité, comedy built from straight-faced delivery to an acknowledged offscreen crew.
- Waiting for Guffman (1996) — The Guest-school method of shooting vast quantities of long improvised takes and carving character from them — the ancestor of the film's 125-hours-to-90-minutes edit ratio.
- Man Bites Dog (1992) — Originates the black-comic 'documentary etiquette' gag — a polite camera crew embedded with a serial killer — that the film reworks as journalists solemnly filming vampires who feed on people.
- Zelig (1983) — Pioneers sustaining a faux-documentary register while smuggling in impossible in-camera trickery, the deadpan-doc-plus-visual-effect fusion the film applies to floating and mirror gags.
- Interview with the Vampire (1994) — Establishes the vampire household as domestic melodrama — centuries-old housemates nursing petty grievances — which the film literalizes as chore-wheel flatmate comedy.
- The Lost Boys (1987) — Codifies vampirism as a cool youth subculture with practical flying/levitation gags on wires, the reference for Deacon's hovering and the film's coven-as-clique staging.
- Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992) — Its insistence on in-camera, on-set illusion — disembodied shadows, practical transformations — models the film's rule of doing bat-morphs and levitation with wires and reversed film rather than CGI.
- Eagle vs Shark (2007) — Waititi's first feature fixes the New Zealand deadpan house style — awkward silences, gentle losers, flat affect held past the point of comfort — that the vampires deliver straight.
- Flight of the Conchords (2007) — Clement and Waititi's laconic two-hander timing and low-status deadpan performance, the comic wavelength both directors carry directly into the flat's interviews.
- Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (2006) — The closest structural cousin: a doc crew trails a horror monster who cheerfully explains his craft, then the camera's neutral etiquette breaks once the killing actually starts.
- Shaun of the Dead (2004) — Shares the affectionate horror-comedy method of playing genre mechanics dead straight while mining the mundane domestic friction around them, love letter rather than parody.
- Boy (2010) — Extends the same NZ deadpan ensemble and chapter-beat comic rhythm, the tonal bedrock Waititi brings to the coven.
- Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016) — Carries the film's deadpan-improv duo dynamic and title-card chaptering forward into a bush-chase buddy comedy.
- Thor: Ragnarok (2017) — Ports the loose improv-driven deadpan (and Waititi's own soft-spoken-monster performance as Korg) into a studio blockbuster, proving the method scales.
- What We Do in the Shadows (2019) — The direct franchise afterlife — serializes the exact mockumentary-vampire-flatmate format, doc-crew conceit and deadpan confessionals intact, across a new coven.
- Wellington Paranormal (2018) — Spins the film's supernatural-meets-documentary-etiquette premise into a police procedural, deadpan officers calmly narrating impossible events to camera.
Appears in courses