“What We Do in the Shadows”

For those of you who already have the pleasure of knowing about what I am writing, How AWESOME are they? For those of you who are just discovering this title and thinking, “what the f… is that?” It is a fictitious reality show following present-day Vampires who live in community among the living. I say that they are awesome because What We Do in the Shadows is a movie and a TV series. You are welcome! And if you ask, what came first? Well, it was the hen and not the egg; I mean, the movie.

The movie is a comedy/horror? Created, directed, and starred by Taika Waititi—director of films like Jojo Rabbit and Thor: Ragnarok—and Jemaine Clement—one of the two members of Flight of the Concords, another magical jewel. Do I sound biased? Well… maybe just a little bit. Waititi and Clement are part of a group of vampires sharing a house in New Zealand. Everything is told in docu-reality format with confessionals and their own camera crew. If you enjoy the dry clever humor of performers like Bill Murray or Jeff Goldblum, you will most certainly enjoy any Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement production. If you don’t, just give it a try; you can later complain to me in the comments section about how I ruined your weekend, and then I can answer back that I’m a robot from the future, “the distant future, the year 2000” (Flight of the Concords), and I’m here to steal your time. 

The series, on the other hand, has a different permanent cast and, on IMDB, has listed only Jemaine Clement as creator, even though both—Clement and Waititi—have made contributions to the show. The main characters, three vampires in the traditional sense, one energy vampire, and one familiar, live all together in a house in Staten Island. Their stories are told in the same fashion as in the movie through the recordings made by the docu-reality crew that follows them around.

The series and the movie are both clever, original, and well produced. They have an exceptional cast with performers of great trajectory, which is what drove me to watch them in the first place. I mean, how can I say no to that if I already loved FOTC so much? If you want to start slow and from the beginning, go for the movie, but if you are more of an IT Crowd kind of person, go straight to the series. Trust me, just this once, and you are welcome… again.