Director: Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi
Screenplay: Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi
Starring: Taika Waititi, Jemaine Clement, Jonathan Brugh, Ben Fransham, Cori Gonzalez-Macuer, Stu Rutherford, Jackie van Beek, Rhys Darby
Running Time: 85 minutes
Genre: Horror, comedy
Wellington, New Zealand: A documentary film crew follow several months in the afterlife of four vampires who all share the same house: uptight 369 year old Viago (Waititi) who vainly tries to maintain some kind of order, 879 year old former tyrant Vladislav (Clement), 183 year old young rebel Deacon (Brugh) and savage 8,000 year old Petyr (Fransham). Aided by Deacon's "familiar" Jackie (van Beek), who aspires to become a vampire herself, the gang spend their time hunting victims and trying to avoid sunlight and occasional scuffles with the local werewolf gang led by "alpha male" Anton (Darby).
Horror comedies are very difficult to make work, because there is the risk of the comedy overshadowing the horror, meaning there is no edge or drama to it, or the horror overshadows the comedy and makes it just bleak. This however really works well. It's filmed in the "mockumentary" style familiar from movies such as This is Spinal Tap (1983), or TV shows such as The Office or Parks and Recreation. It pokes fun at various vampire tropes: Vladislav is like a parody of Gary Oldman in Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992) and Petyr, the most brutal and least human looking of the group, is obviously based on the vampire in Nosferatu (1926). Much of the humour comes from how vampires would function in the modern day, and the problems of living with vampire powers (how do you look stylish when you can't see yourself in the mirror?, where do you go when you can't enter a building without being invited?) The film is never really scary, but it is quite dark, there is no getting away from the fact that the vampires are killers. The film is irreverent but celebratory of the vampire genre, and is fresher and more imaginative than any vampire movie for a long time. Most of all it is genuinely and consistently funny.
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