A sweet, funny vampire show to sink your teeth into

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This article was published 26/10/2024 (343 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

There are many varieties of vampires out there in the pop culture universe, and you’ll see a lot of them lurking on your streaming services and rental platforms in October.

There are angsty adolescent vampires (the Twilight franchise) and decadent aristocrat vampires (Interview with the Vampire).

There are the depressive vamps of Only Lovers Left Alive, eternal hipsters who use their endless oceans of time to listen to cool bands you’ve never heard of. There are the repulsive parasites of The Strain, which infect human hosts through a kind of fast-moving tapeworm.

There are scary-sexy vampires, sexy-scary vampires, doomed romantic vampires, ethical vegan vampires.

I have pretty eclectic taste in the undead, but even I reach vampire overload. And when I do, I hit the refresh button by watching the funny vampires. That’s why I’m thrilled about the return of What We Do in the Shadows, which started its sixth and final season this week on Disney+.

The franchise began with an original 2014 movie, created by Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi, which introduced us to some hapless vamps sharing a flat in modern-day New Zealand.

It was shot mockumentary-style, and the central joke was that the vampires’ central problems were not supernatural. Mostly, they got hung up on the same banal things that humans do, like bickering over whose turn it is to wash the dishes. (This is such a sweetly goofy gag that in our household we’ve been known to defuse debates about chores by saying, “It’s time to have a flat meeting,” in fake Transylvanian accents.)

Taking a good movie and spinning it off into a television series can be a bad idea, but the TV show, which relocates to a mouldering Staten Island mansion and brings in a new bunch of housemates, is great. It riffs on the kooky tone of the original but finds its own anarchic and absurdist vibe. In many ways, given more space and more time — something vampires have a whole lot of — the television series even surpasses its source.

The show’s bloodsuckers include Nandor (Kayvan Novak), a former medieval warlord, Laszlo (Matt Berry), a debauched 18th-century Englishman, and Nadja (Natasia Demetriou), a onetime Mediterranean peasant. There’s also Colin Robinson (Mark Proksch), an “energy vampire” who feeds on the living by boring them into a stupor with actuarial facts or historical trivia. Keeping the household going is Guillermo (Harvey Guillen), a much-put-upon human familiar.

Like many of their horror-movie prototypes, these vampires are supreme egotists. But they’re such cheerful hedonists and they’re so comically hopeless at contemporary life that they become oddly appealing.

There are a few larger story arcs — feuds with the Vampiric Council, skirmishes with werewolves, some labour-management issues with Guillermo, who turns out to come from a long line of vampire hunters. But much of the comedy is found in random asides and offbeat details — Nadja’s gloriously foul-mouthed complaining, Laszlo’s idiosyncratic line deliveries, Nandor’s sudden enthusiasm for the self-help book I’m OK, You’re OK.

Though these vampires can, and sometimes do, turn into bats or hypnotize people, they spend a lot of time doing human-type things — getting in line at the DMV, working in the gig economy, going to a chain restaurant — jalapeño poppers for the table! — making their first trip to the local suburban mall. (“It’s like a fairy tale told by an insane child,” marvels Nandor.)

What We Do in the Shadows has also pulled off possibly the best-ever spoof of the home-renovation show genre, with a house-flipping TV host gamely sticking to the HGTV formula — accent walls, walk-in closets, bowls of decorative balls — when faced with the mansion’s dank open cesspits and mating racoons.

There are celebrity cameos — Mark Hamill, Sofia Coppola, Jim Jarmusch, Tilda Swinton and Wesley Snipes have dropped in. There are musical numbers.

Not everything works — I could live without Baby Colin Robinson and Nadja’s sentient doll — but the lead performances are consistently hilarious and inventive, and the freaky energy never flags.

The show is funny, dark and oddly sweet. If you feel you’ve watched too many seriously scary vampire movies this October, why not take a break and sink your teeth into the new season of What We Do in the Shadows.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca