There are two kinds of horror comedies: the scary kind and the silly kind. The scary kind—from Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) to An American Werewolf in London (1981) to Drag Me to Hell (2009)—keep the laughs and the chills strictly segregated, building tension and then releasing it in a laugh (and, sometimes, cutting short that laugh with an even bigger scare). The silly kind—from Young Frankenstein (1974) to Shaun of the Dead (2004)—erase the line between the two, turning the monster into an object of burlesque. This latter strategy is a tricky business that goes wrong more often than right, as you may know if you’ve ever seen Love at First Bite (1979) or Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995) or Dark Shadows (2012). Once you’ve mixed the red and green paints together, you’d better get just the right shade of brown or you’re going to wind up with something that looks like shit.
Incongruity is funny—that’s why improv artists pair up random words from the audience—and the filmmakers get a surprising amount of mileage from combining vampires with The Real World. The show’s psychological hook has always been the chance to watch divisions fester among people trapped in a single house, and Clement and Waititi score plenty of laughs filtering this through the familiar vampire lore. Petyr has bitten a young loser named Nick (Cori Gonzalez-Macuer) and added him to the household, which causes friction with the others. “I don’t think Nick should have been turned into a vampire,” Deacon confides to the camera. “He’s such a dick.” Nick further complicates the situation by bringing his human friend, Stu (Stuart Rutherford), whom the others agree not to eat only because he’s an IT guy who solves their computer problems. Less fortunate is Deacon’s human slave, Jackie (Jackie van Beek), who’s spent years waiting on him hand and foot in hope of achieving eternal life. “They don’t even wear shirts, they wear blouses,” she complains over an ironing board. “It’s this big homoerotic dick-biting club, and I’m stuck here ironing their fucking frills!”
Directed by Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement
