By Maria Lewis
“Lycanfan? Lycanphile? Lycanthropaphile?” Listening to Jemaine Clement work his way through what the preferred name for a werewolf fan should be, going back and forth with different portmanteaus and prounciation, you get the clear sense that this is something that really matters. To him, at least. Coming up with the right collective fan name for a mythological monster is just as important as what you do with said monster. Werewolves are vital, but so too are swearwolves. Clement is now somewhat royalty among horror and genre fans, along with his close friend and longtime collaborator, Taika Waititi. Their newfound status is all thanks to a little movie called What We Do In The Shadows. You may have heard of it.
Premiering at The Sundance Film Festival before a late 2014 release, the horror-comedy was one of those rare films that almost instantly became a cult classic. It shares the same kind of feverish following of recent cult favourites like Attack The Block, Scott Pilgrim Vs The World, and Black Dynamite, with lycanfans using lines from What We Do In The Shadows as a sort of cursory test of one’s coolness. If you answer an offer of “bisgetti for dinner?” with a quizical look and a raised eyebrow, for instance, you’re out of the club. “That’s been the wonderful thing about that movie,” says Clement, speaking on the phone from his base in Auckland. “It’s a whole different audience from any of the other things we’ve done. We have people dressed in black clothes , white makeup, and black lipstick coming up at events – that’s new for us.”
With lines from the script having worked their way seamlessly into the pop culture lexicon and a burgeoning industry of What We Do In The Shadows merch online – both official and bootleg – it seems hard two years on from the film’s release to imagine it being anything but a success. Yet history tells us that horror comedy fails more often than it triumphs: for every Shaun Of The Dead, there’s a Life After Beth, and for every Cabin In The Woods, there’s an Idle Hands. As for a New Zealand set mockumentary about vampires living in a share house? “You always imagine some big success over your stupid little idea,” Clement says. “We think like that about everything. But really, looking back at it now, it’s like, ‘Who is going to watch this? It’s nerdy jokes about vampires for an hour-and-a-half?’”
The inkling of an idea that would eventually become What We Do In The Shadows started forming itself over ten years ago for both Clement and Waititi, who met at the Victoria University Of Wellington along with Clement’s Flight Of The Conchords co-hort, Bret McKenzie. “Taika and I are obviously horror geeks,” he notes, “I used to watch any vampire thing that was made when I was a kid, and from that came a lot of questions like, ‘How did he get into the bar? He couldn’t get into their house, so how come he could get into the bar when he was chasing them?’ I’d saved up all those sort of logical questions, and Taika had watched a lot of the same movies.”
The first version of that concept popped up in 2005 when Waititi and Clement put together the short film, What We Do In The Shadows: Interviews With Some Vampires. Running at 27 minutes, it starred much of the main cast that would go on to make up the feature film, inlcuding Jonny Brugh as Deacon, Cori Gonzalez-Macuer as Nick, and Stu Rutherford as everyone’s favourite human mate, Stu. Yet it was nearly a decade before they were able to finally get off the ground and begin production, with Waititi riding his Oscar nomination for Best Live Action Short through to his directorial debut, Eagle Vs Shark, and then Boy just a few years later, while Flight Of The Conchords blew up in earnest for Clement, who was suddenly juggling a TV show, touring, with an abundance of film and TV roles that were flying his way.
Years later, the pair took a series of meetings in the US, where they pitched the film to various studios who were keen to fund it: so long as they could place actors like Zach Galifianakis in the leading roles. Waititi says that they worked the meeting circuit out of curiousity more than anything else, as their priority was always to make the film back home in New Zealand with their friends. The result did what few genre films can: please people within the horror community, but also appeal to those outside of it. For horror nuts, it was those “logical questions” that provided much of the humour, with twists on classic genre moments serving as the love letter that they were intended to be. For those foreign to the murdery movie movement, there was genuine heart and soul to connect with – the character of Stu largely serves as the vessel for that, but so too Viago’s quest to be reunited with his one true love.
Fast forward two years later, and What We Do In The Shadows is still that film people talk about. It’s just expected now that in whatever interview Clement and Waititi do, a portion of it is going to be dedicated to questions about the movie and the universe that it has created. A sequel has been announed, We’re Wolves, along with a television series spin-off, Paranormal Event Response Unit, which will focus on the two Kiwi-as-fuck cops, Officer Minogue and Officer O’Leary (who we met briefly in the original film). Both projects are slated for 2017, but Clement thinks that target may be a little bit ambitious. “We’re just waiting for Taika to finish editing the Thor movie, and then we’ll get on to writing that,” he says. “Whenever he has a bit of space, we’ll talk about it and go off and start writing a script. When we’ve written stuff together, we usually send it to each other: I’ll do a bit, he’ll do a bit, and we’ll piece it together like that over the next year. It will be a while away unfortunately…I wish we could do it right now.”
So too do the millions of lycanfans, spanning from Vellington to Transylvania.
What We Do In The Shadows is available now on VOD, DVD and streaming on Stan.
Maria Lewis is a journalist and author who can be seen on The Feed, weeknights on SBS Viceland. She’s the presenter and producer of the Eff Yeah Film & Feminism podcast. Her debut novel Who’s Afraid? was released in 2016, with the sequel – Who’s Afraid Too? – due for release on January 17, 2017. You can find her on Twitter @MovieMazz.
