Lowering the Stakes

The vampire, as a storytelling trope, makes for stories that alternately fascinate and frustrate me. As something which is both human and not, alive and also dead, eternal and fragile, they can be a powerful lens through which to view our very human selves, our little habits and depravities, our cruelty and grace. This is also frequently what I find frustrating about vampires as they are actually written – in much the same way as magic spells are functionally equivalent to guns in most stories, vampires are usually either superheroes (with a goth tinge), nameless goons (who are also monsters), or romantic loners (who never seem to actually do much active vampiring, or indeed much of anything).

What We Do in the Shadows, at least as of season 3, dips a toe into each of these archetypes, but at its core it is mostly a parody of the third, where these “romantic loners” are primarily ineffectual posers – who have still, it must be said, murdered and eaten an awful lot of people. The show follows vampire housemates Laszlo, Nadja, and Nandor as they go about their vampiric semi-lives – mostly just hanging around the house, reminiscing and eating. They only travel outside the grounds when forced to by a disrespectful werewolf, an old nemesis, an even older boss, or similar. The issue with premising a show around mocking the inert vampire is that, at the end of it, you still have a fundamentally inert character – and it is simply not easy to write a story around characters like that. Colin Robinson, the fourth housemate, an energy vampire who feeds by boring and frustrating the people around him is the only one who seems to have any regular contact with the outside world – but even in that case he does basically the same thing every day, inactive in aggregate and without any desire beyond the immediate. The show solves this particular issue largely through the character of Guillermo, Nandor’s “familiar” (a glorified go-fer with no particular powers, despite the lofty title). If something needs to be done, Guillermo does it – finding victims, burying them, cleaning up, paying bills – and for much of the show he thanklessly tackles the screenwriters’ work as well, being the sole character with desires, qualms, plans, and vulnerability in a world of detached immortal bosses.

There’s some tension in this portrayal: Guillermo is portrayed as a very gentle and caring man, while also being, objectively speaking, one of history’s greatest mass-murderers. Even at a fairly conservative count of the number of people he must lure to their deaths in order to feed three vampires, he has to be responsible for a hundred deaths or more. Can we forgive Guillermo? We’re never asked to. The show would, seemingly, rather not dwell on this in any way. Eventually it is revealed that he is, by happenstance, a born natural in the art of vampire hunting – and, weirdly, this is what as treated as the primary internal conflict for the character, completely disregarding the monstrosity of his everyday actions. Should he hunt vampires, which he excels at (and which is probably better for every living person on Staten Island)? Or should he continue to befriend them and attempt to become one (probably dooming hundreds more people to death)? This conflict is one between ambition and loyalty – not between morality and desire, as one might suppose. This wouldn’t bother me if someone would at least comment on it, but everyone seems to treat these weird priorities as completely natural – though, I suppose, he mostly hangs out with vampires, and they would wouldn’t they? The deaths of the people he collects are seldom referred to except as morbid punchlines – the life and death of the prey mentioned never.

This demonstrates what I believe to be the show’s greatest weakness: Horror and comedy are a potent combination, as they both rely on mastery of creating and releasing tension, and they can work extraordinarily well together. Even as silly as the original What We Do in the Shadows movie was, it had moments of bloody violence and panic to emphasize that, yeah, these are vampires, and they are dangerous. However, most of the time its television successor tries to diffuse all the tension of its horror half, which has the side-effect of making the comedy half less effective. That is not to say the show isn’t funny – it is quite entertaining, with a cast full of comedic talent. However, it frustratingly stops just short of realizing its potential much of the time, both because it refuses to acknowledge the darkness of its premise and because it refuses to let its characters grow.

By the time the third season rolls around, the writers seem to begin recognizing some of these core problems. The vampire characters start befriending mortals, start becoming dissatisfied with their boring lives, rediscover old ambitions and start to take action. They become characters, not just reaction shots, and the show is enriched by it, rediscovering some of the tension abandoned along the way. In one of the show’s most effective moments, Nandor joins a sort of new-age vampire cult, vampires trying to become human again. This is does the job both of portraying an important part of his character – the last time he felt really relevant was long ago, possibly when he was still human, and his desperation to recapture that – and at portraying an unnerving kind of horror, the horror of the everyday superimposed upon and overriding the horror of the supernatural. In this moment, the predatoriness of cults and multi-level-marketing schemes vividly supplants and horrifically devours the more romantic violence of the monstrous vampire. This is what I want from vampire media, the lens of picturesque and romantic monsters used to view commonplace banal monstrosities: Vampires may be scary, but perhaps they have much to learn of the ways of the more prosaic, commonplace, and brutal predations developed by their nominal prey.

If you enjoyed this essay, please consider supporting me on Patreon. Support at any level lets you read new posts one week early and adds your name to the list of supporters on the sidebar.