If you told me 11 years ago that one of my favorite television shows in the future was going to be about vampires I would have told you to get lost, because as much as I loved the concept of vampires, in 2010 it was hard to find anything current that didn’t involve the type lovelorn teenage vampire found in works like Twilight and The Vampire Diaries. Sure there were shows like True Blood that were aimed at an older audience that I didn’t mind watching, but I wanted something to scratch the itch I felt when I first read Dracula and became fascinated by vampires.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0021814/mediaviewer/rm3327707392/?ref_=ext_shr_lnk
It wasn’t until 2014 when Taika Waiti and Jemaine Clement released their low-budget, independent mockumentary “What We Do In The Shadows” that I was thoroughly enamored with the vampire again. The story is that a documentary crew has been given access to film a group of vampires living in a flat together in New Zealand and document them as they prepare for “The Unholy Masquerade” which is essentially a vampiric ball. Clement stars as Vladislav the Poker, a medieval era vampire very reminiscent of the Dracula and Vlad the Impaler, Waititi plays Viago, the “fussy” leader of the household, who in life was an 18th-century dandy who eventually came to New Zealand to chase after a human love.
The pair also live with Deacon, an even younger vampire that considers himself the “bad boy” of the group but really seems to bother the others more with his laziness and then in the basement resides Petyr, an 8000-year-old, Nosferatu looking vampire who can’t really be bothered to attend the group’s flat meetings.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3416742/mediaviewer/rm3025644545/?ref_=ext_shr_lnk
Much of the humor is derived from the absurdity with which the vampires live life in modern society; unlike the vampires in Twilight that wear high-end clothing and drive around expensive cars, the vampires in Shadows live very differently. They don’t really go clothes shopping, a lot of their clothing comes from the people they kill, they also cannot see their reflections in the mirror so they draw pictures of each other to show them what they’re wearing. They don’t have anything super fancy to drive but they can transform into animals such as bats. Additionally, they struggle to get into clubs because they can’t enter another property without being invited in and their conflict with the werewolves is less epic showdown and more rude banter mostly caused by the vampires.
It’s as if the glamor that we had come to associate vampires with had been removed and what was left was grosser but truer to the original monster and it reinvigorated the entire genre for me and many others who fell in love with the peculiar crew of undead.
In 2019 the world of Shadows got bigger with the debut of the FX television series by the same name. The show follows a different set of vampires sharing a house on Staten Island and while it can be a difficult move to make a spin-off work, this iteration is just as delightful as the film was, and in many areas expands even further than the original. This vampiric household consists of Nandor the Relentless, an Ottoman empire-era warlord who was run out of his village (for eating villagers) and now spends much of his time posturing over the other vampires or exhausting his dutiful familiar Guillermo. Nadja and Lazslo are a married couple of vampires that also live in the house and spend perhaps too much time enjoying the more hedonistic, carnal desires of undeath than they do actual vampiric business and the last vampire in the household is unique in that he is an energy vampire, who instead of subsisting on blood, drains the life force of humans (and other vampires) through exhausting, or angering conversations. His abilities and weaknesses compared to the other vampires, plus the fact that he literally survives off of irritating the people around him makes him a comedic goldmine.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8479420/mediaviewer/rm3655886080/?ref_=ext_shr_lnk
I think ironically what keeps the vampires refreshing in Shadows is also what keeps them classic. I think people are free to interpret the vampire as they will but there are lots of subtle nuances to the mythology of the vampire that got lost over time. Dusty, unsexy rules for travel that include bringing dirt from your ancestral homeland with you, or risk becoming trapped on the property in a perpetually weakened state are a real problem the vampires in Shadows find themselves having to contend with. One episode from this 3rd season saw the vampires becoming stuck in a hotel-casino in Atlantic City after their ancestral dirt is unceremoniously vacuumed up by housekeeping. They then need to rely on the help of the human familiar Guillermo to get them out of their situation by going back to their home countries to round up a bag of dirt for them.
Guillermo is also a really refreshing character, and being one of the few humans in a show full of supernatural beings he still manages to stand out. Guillermo acts as Nandor’s servant, mostly running the house, doing errands, and most important sourcing and disposing of the vampire’s “meals”. That’s another modern trope that Shadows moved away from, the idea of a “vegetarian” vampire who will find any other source of blood before biting a human. Instead, the vampires in Shadows regularly consume human blood, and that comes with the grim task of Guillermo having to bury the bodies in the backyard once the victim is empty. Guillermo does this because as with many humans who have become familiars, he too hopes to become a vampire one day and Nandor has promised him that he will. Well, he promised 10 years ago, and that’s the problem, most vampires don’t make good on their word.
The series stars Kayvan Novak, Matt Berry, Natasia Demetriou, Harvey Guillen, and Mark Proksch and I would recommend it to anyone looking for a bloody good time.