What We All Do in the Shadows
Currents
To the casual observer, vampires may appear to be just another spooky entrée in the menu of horror and fantasy monsters, alongside ghosts, demons, goblins, and zombies. To the more discerning eye, however, these heliophobic anemics are more than mere garden-variety ghouls. Modern vampires have personality. They have a certain manner about them. They have sensibilities and tastes always at odds with mainstream society. And they are sexual beings, even if we never see them having sex. Sometimes this aspect is explored openly; other times it remains subtextual, relying on the audience to read between the lines of the sexual tensions. The very imagery of vampirism in action — the feline grace with which they stalk their victims; the delicate, almost sensual way with which they play with their “food”; the forbidden pleasures and taboos; the lithe figures frozen in the pale beauty of youth — these do more than just border on the erotic. For over 200 years, vampires have been used as narrative devices to reflect each generation’s conception of queerness, including its repression. The comedy horror television series What We Do in the Shadows (2019 – present) wonderfully depicts our current moment, with its complex mix of unprecedented liberation and desperate search for meaning.
Vampires and vampiric creatures have been featured in the legends, superstitions, and folktales of peoples around the world for millennia. Many of these ancient or archaic precursors ran the gamut from evil spirits to twisted monstrosities, nightmarish beasts, or reanimated corpses, a far cry from the sickly but all-too-human versions we now recognize. The modern vampire is generally traced to the 1819 short story The Vampyre, by British writer and physician John William Polidori, featuring a refined English nobleman-turned-vampire, based on the real-life bisexual libertine — and Polidori’s patient — Lord Byron.
Throughout the 19th century, the vampire literary genre took shape, evolving both as an art form and with the times, including the 1872 gothic novella Carmilla, and culminating in Bram Stoker’s iconic Dracula in 1897. In these and the many other notable vampire stories since, virtually every vampire is either openly or subtextually queer, and each tale acts as a metaphor for the socio-cultural mores of their era. The Byron-inspired character in The Vampyre has a relationship with a wealthy young gentleman taut with an unwritten craving for something further than friendship. Such desires were too forbidden even to openly acknowledge, let alone act on. 50 years later, in Carmilla, a female vampire gives in to the sexual lust of her prey, a teenage girl, leading to her own ruin. Stoker’s Dracula goes on to explore sexual degeneracy and the flouting of Victorian respectabilities. Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 adaptation was more explicitly bisexual, but even there, too, the sexuality was repressed. What We Do in the Shadows has turned this pattern on its head.
SPOILER WARNING: Major plot elements revealed for What We Do in the Shadows.
Based on the 2014 indie film of the same name, the comedy horror mockumentary What We Do in the Shadows follows the lives of a group of vampires living in Staten Island. The show’s vibes are a quirky blend of The Office, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and a vampire-specific version of The Addams Family. In the 4th season, the gang wants to fix up the haunted-style mansion they live in, which has fallen into extraordinary disrepair but finds themselves short on funds. Nadja (Natasia Demetriou), always pining for elements of her past human life, tries to address their money problems by opening a vampire nightclub, despite having no idea what she’s doing. Over the course of the season, Nandor (Kavyan Novak), another vampire roommate and something of a blockhead, finds himself lonely and seeks a spouse, while the normally lecherously carefree Laszlo (Matt Berry), Nadja’s husband, develops a bond with the child version of Colin (Mark Proksch) and raises him as a son.
Where to start with Colin? Alright, he’s the only one of the bunch who’s an energy vampire, meaning he doesn’t look like a vampire, has basically no special abilities, and has none of the typical vampiric vulnerabilities. He sustains himself by boring and frustrating the everliving piss out of people, and feeding off their emotions. If you took a lobotomized accountant, a boiled chicken breast, the chimeric hybrid of Jeb Bush and Ben Stein, a pair of tighty-whities, and the PGA tour, threw them all into a witch’s caldron with a little hocus-pocus, you’d get Colin. At the end of season three, Colin died. Sort of. An infant version of himself — with the body of a baby but his same adult face — burst out of his chest. You learn to take these things in stride.
The glue that holds not only the household but the entire show together is Nandor’s familiar (a sort of bodyguard and assistant) and the crew's only non-vampire, Guillermo (Harvey Guillén), who’s everything the rest of his housemates are not. They’re vampires, and he’s a descendant of the vampire killer Van Helsing. They exude vampire coolness, and he’s a spherical, sweater-vested normie. They’re debauched hedonists, and he’s straight-laced. They’re recklessly irresponsible, flitting from one cockamamie fancy to the next with no thought of consequences, and he’s the lone voice of reason — stressed and at wit’s end. Most notably, they’re bisexual and non-monogamous, and he’s gay and monogamous. Despite being chronically overworked and disrespected, Guillermo sticks around in the hopes that he, too, will be made a vampire one day. But the other vampires somehow instinctively sense that he’s not made of the right stuff. They don’t merely deny his wish; they barely acknowledge his desire and, indeed his existence, often forgetting his name and even his presence in the household. In the 5th season, Guillermo, at long last, becomes a vampire — only, in an ironic twist, to decide that it’s not for him after all.
Departing from most of its vampire genre predecessors over the past 200 years, What We Do in the Shadows depicts queerness not as unspeakably forbidden, or as an evil secret desire, or as a naughty transgressive act, but as both aspirational and normal. What The Addams Family did as a parody of American fears of immigrants and a celebration of eccentricity, individuality, and immigrant culture, Shadows does for sexual and romantic liberty. In this world, being queer isn’t taboo or risqué — it’s been so normalized that same-sex attraction, on its own, renders one not queer enough. And vampiredom is an exclusive club reserved only for the queerest of the queer. In a playful role reversal of the real-life dynamic where bisexuals are sometimes regarded as not “gay enough”, being a vanilla gay guy is seen as so plain and unremarkable as to be undeserving not only of becoming a vampire but of basic courtesy as well. Guillermo is left for days at a time in a coffin, housed in a room with a sewage leak, enrolled in death matches for vampire amusement, and left to tend to the many practical affairs the vampires can’t be bothered with and seem not even to understand are required to make ends meet. Even the excruciatingly tedious Colin, with his monotonal soliloquies on esoteric minutiae, commands more respect.
What We Do in the Shadows also captures the sense of hollow nihilism so ascendant in internet culture and among generations Y and Z. The endless attention-deficit chase after minor thrills; the rapid cycle of interests, each soon abandoned and forgotten; the sense that nothing really matters; and the indulgence in fantastic powers and freedoms that only thinly paper over a crushing emptiness and lack of meaning. This hardly seems like the stuff of comedy, but the key to any joke is in the exaggeration, and Shadows has a bottomless bag of tricks from which to draw. Whether it’s Nandor comically squandering djinn wishes in his quest to feel alive, or Laszlo hitting the road with a rapidly-aging baby Colin as a child stage act, or Nadja’s many ruinous travails managing a vampire nightclub with blood sprinklers that won’t work and wraith workers demanding labor rights, the absurdism of the show brings out an existential gallows humor.
Vampires may have no reflection, but they are a reflection of us. What We Do in the Shadows holds up a mirror revealing a youth culture that is more queer, more sexually fluid, and more disdainful of tradition than ever, but that seeks to invert hierarchies instead of softening them. A generation that is more liberated and free, and yet remains enthralled with superficialities and fundamentally dissatisfied. The satire contains a warning: total freedom shorn of any responsibility is ultimately unsatisfying. Behind the hilarity of a button-dicked Jersey Devil, the cavalcade of ass-covering hypnotisms, and the hours of queuing complainants responding to “Speak now or forever hold your peace” at Nandor’s wedding, there is a core of gothic horror more disquieting than any monster. What haunts us when we’re alone with our thoughts isn’t any creature of the night, but our deepest worries, insecurities, uncertainties, and regrets. What we all do in the shadows is face the abyss. We might as well do it with a laugh and a cheeky grin.
What We Do in the Shadows (2019 – present)
Published Oct 10, 2022
Updated Oct 2, 2023
