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"What we do in the Shadows" Response

I had never seen this movie before but I knew of the director Taika Waititi for his direction and acting in Thor Ragnarok. Watching this film was a hilariously absurd look into the world of vampires in New Zeland who live ridiculously larger than life lives, even for vampires. It was hard to know exactly what was coming with this film, but it ended up being another reason to love Waititi's cleverness and humor in filmmaking. I agree that incongruity was present throughout the film, and this can be shown in the first scene, where one of the Vampires is going around trying to get the other vampires to come to a flat meeting and to do their chores around the house, which is not something you would expect a vampire to do.
One reason that I think that this comedy works so well is that it takes vampires, which are creatures that are supposed to be scary and puts them in situations that show how funny their predicament would be in the modern world. Another hilarious scene is when the group of Vampires run into a group of werewolves who have a leader who seems set on his "gang" not swearing, and says "werewolves, not swear-wolves". This moment works so well because, in folklore, werewolves are often the vicious and vulgar ones, but here, they try to be more civil than the vampires. This shows incongruity because it is not expected that the werewolves would try to act civilly, but they do. This was a hilarious movie and I think a large reason it is so funny is because it takes a creature that many people know and flips the audience's expectations of vampires from fiction as scary, dark creatures and makes them the joke.

Comments

  1. I wonder if this would be as funny with any other group of monsters living together. Zombies?

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