What We Do In The Shadows Monster House

The lowdown on a vampire flatshare mock-doc with a Flight Of The Conchords edge

What happens when four centuries- old vampires share a flat in present- day New Zealand? That’s the premise of What We Do In The Shadows, the latest project by frequent collaborators Taika Waititi ( Eagle Vs Shark) and Jemaine Clement ( one half of Flight Of The Conchords). Expanded from a 2006 short, the film sees Waititi and Clement both sharing directing duties and playing a vampire each. So where did the idea come from? “It’s a mixture of things,” Clement tells Red Alert. I pitched to Taika that we do a vampire film and I’d just seen one called Nadia. I was actually thinking of something like that: black and white, arty, but with funny characters – it would have made a weird film. And then Taika said, ‘ Well, what if we make it like a documentary, so we can show all the things they can do, but as if it’s real?’ So it was just those two things.”

Needless to say, both Clement and Waititi are self- confessed vampire fans. “We both loved vampire films, or grew up with them, as they were big during the ’ 70s and ’ 80s,”