What We Do in the Shadows: Interviews with Some Vampires (2005) Online

This is a short film that eventually was remade as a brilliant full- length film, "What We Do in the Shadows". Apparently this short floated around the internet for a while and was used to try to secure funding for the later movie.

What I immediately noticed about this 27 minute short is that it's incredibly low energy compared to the later film. The camera is nearly always stationary, the actors portraying the vampires sound almost as if they are half-asleep and the jokes are very, very few. Because of this, it's not a must-see for fans of the later movie. A few other things you will notice if you watch this one is that the actors' voices are a bit harder to understand as the prosthetic vampire teeth apparently were difficult to talk with clearly. And, the music is very cheap and simple....as is this film itself. Not a terrible film but one that is a mere shadow of its later incarnation and not terribly enjoyable.

This is the short (half hour) early version of what in 2014 became the feature film 'What We Do in the Shadows'. The 2014 film is brilliant, inventive, quirky, and side-splittingly funny. But that's the later 2014 film. THIS short film shows the trio creating their characters, and so it's really a rough sketch of what later becomes a great painting. I'm pretty sure that if I'd seen this short first, I'd never have watched the feature film, and that would be sad.

So my advice is, watch the 2014 full-length film first, then watch this short to learn a little about the amazing transformations that can occur in the creative process.

"What We Do in the Shadows: Interviews with Some Vampires" is a live action short film from New Zealand that was made over 10 years ago and people will immediately recognize the connection to the successful full feature film from last year. Both were made by 7-time Emmy nominee Jemaine Clement and Oscar nominee Taika Waititi and focus on the pretty ordinary life of vampires. This one here runs for shortly under half an hour and deals with the subject of how a trio of vampires lives together in an apartment and they need to make sure everybody fulfills his cleaning duties. But of course they also need the blood. In one of the funniest moments of the film, there is talk about a virgin being like a sandwich that nobody has eaten before. In general, the humor and line delivery here felt a lot like the approach Sacha Baron Cohen gives his comedy. I think it is a really good watch for people who enjoy (somewhat different = not creepy) vampire films. Go check it out and if you like it, see the new movie that came out a year ago or two.

Audibility is a serious problem with this film, between the sound quality and the actors' indifferent diction skills. I tried watching it with auto-generated closed captioning, but that wasn't an improvement, as after the opening sequences I was still left with an uneasy and I'm hoping impression that one of the vampires had just confessed to an act of bestiality.

This comedy movie is one of the best comedies that you can see. Taika Waititi is a great actor and director