What We Do in the Shadows - Mock the Vamp

Once again I was lead into a cinema on nothing more than good word of mouth online and the idea that I maybe once saw a teaser for the film. It's surprising how often this results in a pleasant experience.

"What We Do in the Shadows" is a mockumentary following a group of vampires who all live in the same house. One of the pillars of being a vampire is not telling it to anyone, as it will only end up with fighting, and humans are just better off not knowing. The camera crew shooting an exposé excluded, of course.

The word I head of this film was that it would be one of the funniest of the year, but I was still taken aback at how funny this film actually was. They don't really do any jokes about vampires you haven't seen or heard before, but they do them in a refreshing and incredibly fun way. Having each vampire be from different points of time is one of those ways. It's often glanced over how old vampires are, and how much of an age difference there can be, but here it's all on the table. You have your present day vampires, and you have vampires dating back eight thousand years.

There has been a lot of mockumentary style comedy over the last decade or so, to the point where I myself often can be put off a bit just by the mention of it being used (even though I quite like a lot of mockumentaries). But this proves that the genre does indeed have merit. They use the mockumentary aspect more to their advantage than things like "Parks and Recreation" or "The Office" which might be the best known examples of this type of storytelling. This isn't just a comedy in the style of a documentary (i.e. shaky camera, talking to the camera), they incorporate a lot more into it. Making it feel like a proper documentary a lot of the time, making it all the more ridiculous and hilarious. If you only see one film about vampires this season, make it "What We Do in the Shadows".