Mandatory Mad Fiction Frog Dissection: What We Do In the Pandemic: The Two What We Do in the Shadowses (Patreon)

You all picked an easy one for me this month. So I want you to sit down.

Brace yourself. Get some fortifying snacks, fluids, and smelling salts within easy reach. Hold onto something.

I have virtually nothing negative to say about the What We Do in the Shadows series.

I’ll wait for you to recover.

I just don’t! Even the theme song is pure fire! I love it and it’s awesome and pretty much everyone in it is fantastic and my major complaint is I don’t have season 3, 4, and 5 to watch right now. Enjoy this, because it’s not often I have so little nits to pick.

And all that is ironic because I put this series in the queue and let it sit there for a loooong time. I would look at it of an evening and go ughhhhh I should try it. I could watch this. It’s probably good. It’s probably not traumatic. And then I would not, because I absolutely hated the movie.

And that, my friends, is a controversial opinion here on Taika Waititi’s internet.

After finishing the WWDITS series, I actually went back and watched the movie version again, thinking that I would perhaps not find it so fucking upsetting after mainlining two seasons of that universe.

And I hated it even more than I did the first time.

All the while being told constantly on my feed, the minute I breathed a word about the series, that the movie is better because, you know, that is the universal mating call of the hipster.

It very much is not better. I’m not even gonna qualify that with I think or in my opinion or for this reviewer…

It’s factually just way, way worse.

I will explain why in a minute! And I dare you to argue with me any more stridently than well, I still like it but I guess you have a point. That is how confident I am in my rightness on this one. Just because one came first doesn't make it better. Hard to believe, but true.

So for me, the interesting story here is how they took something that upsets and nauseates me so deeply I couldn’t even make it through the thing the first time I watched it and turning it into a series I can’t get enough of.

Spoiler: the alchemical factor here is, one way or another, however you look at it, Natasia Demetriou.

TIME TO COMPARE AND CONTRAST!

Here’s the thing about the What We Do In the Shadows film: it is a deeply unpleasant, depressing, misogynistic, empathy-free movie with some good jokes in the beginning and a speculative element so you don’t notice.

I can tell you the exact moment I stopped watching OG What We Do. The first time I tried to watch it. It’s right after Viago has laid out a bunch of newspaper in preparation for his date. He brings a young woman back to the house, arranges her carefully on the newspaper, and gets bored listening to her hopes and dreams and genuine human ambitions and tells her to be quiet so he can murder her and not get any of her inconvenient blood on the furniture. This is followed up by a deadpan joke about how accidents happen and it was very messy, phrased, as many of the jokes are, to draw an obvious connection between grisly murder and regular old heterosexual intercourse.

OMG SO FUN. Just, like, I dunno, so refreshing and different and lighthearted!

Look, I don’t want to be one of those HUMORLESS GODDAMNED FEMINISTS here, but I’m gonna be a humorless goddamned feminist here. The scene didn’t make me laugh or ruminate on the pointlessness of life. It made me nauseous and fucking depressed. Because while the first act is funny, What We Do In the Shadows is two hours of watching cishet men graphically murder and feed off of women in order to continue their own privileged, ill-gotten life of superiority over their victims and then laugh their asses off about it and expect you to think they’re cool and laugh, too. I’m sorry, that ain’t speculative, that’s the real stupid horrible world. That’s a thing that happens to real women all around me. That’s a thing that could happen to me if things went just wrong enough on just the right day. There is no qualitative difference between watching these guys and watching Ted Bundy laugh about the women he killed. 

And thank you so much, movie, oh, movie, for this one: “[Why do vampires drink virgin blood?] I think of it like this. If you were going to eat a sandwich, you would just enjoy it more if you knew no one had fucked it.”

Now, that is a super fucking funny line. I’m not going to pretend it isn’t or that I didn’t laugh, because it is and I did. But I feel A LITTLE LESS CHUCKLEY WUCKLEY ABOUT IT now that it’s been used on every incel and MRA forum in creation to yuck it up about how women who have sex are useless whores who don’t deserve rights. If incels, a group who, you know, occasionally murders a bunch of real women in real life, are tickled and inspired by something, maybe it’s gone a bit wrong somewhere along the way. And in the end, it’s yet another joke whose punchline is: women are not even objects, they’re food, easily consumable, orderable to taste, and whose only purpose is to provide the most pleasure when men use them to replenish their own life force.

Which is the punchline of at least half, if not more, of the jokes in the whole damn film. Men are cool, women are food or loser servants or objects of obsessive male love. And the connection between murdering women and having sex with them is made over and over and OVER again, it is the chief source of comedy and innuendo from start to finish.

Love it, love it, so progressive, so unique, so refreshing really a twist on the old tales. A delight for all audiences! Truly Hollywood has been taken over by SJW feminist harpies and the Sainted Al Bundy couldn’t possibly crack a harmless joke anymore what with How Things Are Now.

You don’t need to look much further than how differently men and women victims are treated in the film to see that I’m not lying to you. Because oh, sure, two men are killed and one is attacked! Equality! 

Okay, yep, sure. Nick is attacked by Nosferatu Petyr and we assume he’s dead—but no, he’s turned into a vampire and is the focus of the rest of the plot yay! Petyr also accidentally kills a male vampire hunter…and is almost immediately killed by sunlight in recompense because karma is swift unless you murder literally thousands of women in which case karma is living in Wellington with your bro-coven of fratpyres. And then, of course, there is Stu. The joke is that he is a completely ordinary white middle class IT guy but all the monsters love him. He is killed by werewolves in the climax of the film…oh but actually he just got turned into a werewolf and now everyone is friends! So in fact, only one man get perma-got in the movie, and his murderer is INSTANTLY punished for it by death after 8,000 years of life.

Most of the female victims don’t even get names. But they do get incredibly graphic and sexualized scenes of their death, so that’s almost like eternal life or everyone loving you because you’re a mediocre white dude whose arc concludes with the ultimate in failing upward, right? And it’s hard not to notice that they never eat men. There’s a twinge of homophobia to it—if murder is equated to sex in this universe, then hunting and murdering and eating men would be gay, and we can’t have THAT in our vampire story, heaven forefend! Everyone talks about eating or turning Stu, but no one does, and when they’re out on the town, no one is looking to make elaborate comparisons between men and sandwiches. IT’S JUST ALL SO MODERN AND HILARIOUS AND AWESOME YOU GUYS.

Then there’s Jackie, the familiar character who becomes Guillermo in the TV series. And she’s a whole mess, too. She’s pathetic, used and shit on, constantly cleaning up the messes of the men and acting as their mother and maid with the hope of becoming a vampire hanging over her head while we, the audience, know Deacon has no intention of ever doing it. Her scenes are the hardest on the stomach in some ways, just this damaged woman disposing of bodies for men who despise her and getting absolutely nothing in return, not even a kind word. And given where the series goes with this character once the gender is swapped, you gotta give a BIG Transylvania-sized side-eye to Jackie’s plot endgame, in which she gets new vampire Nick to turn her (a good and obvious move I confess I have yelled at Guillermo to pull because it’s seriously the correct choice if “being a vampire” is your whole motivation and this clearly isn’t Interview with the Vampire rules where if you get turned by some noob you’re a garbage weaksauce vampire forever) and immediately becomes a bitch harpy of a wife making her husband her familiar and ordering him around based on the same promise no one fulfilled for her. BECAUSE THAT’S WHAT THE MATRIARCHY DO, DON’T YOU KNOW FELLOW GENTS? Can’t let a lady get any power, she’ll just use it to make her man do lady things! The horror! The injustice!

Oh, but don’t worry, What We Do In the Shadows tries to have its cake and eat it too! Are you surprised? I was not! Viago ends up pulling off the absolute ZENITH of Nice Guy fantasies and shows up at his long lost love’s retirement home window after she lived a long life without him doing just fine, looking all young and handsome and makes her a vampire and they live happily ever after and they don’t care about the “age difference” because she finds older men attractive barf. GET IT? The whole joke is she isn’t pretty! Because, you see, you would think that by “age difference” they meant her being 90 and him looking 30, but actually, in a reversal of expectations, he is several hundred years old so technically she is younger, but it’s only funny if you think it would be unfortunate for him to end up with someone old and unattractive in the first place! We couldn’t just let it lie at “he doesn’t see her age because he loves her” that is gross. So we needed to make sure you knew that this really is the best kind of age differential, an older man and a younger woman ha ha ha. 

Also, thanks for making an old lady a vampire so she has to live in an old-ass arthritic bent-spine body forever while you get to stay young and beautiful, Viago, you nonce.

And the really weird thing is, that joke is quite a lightening of mood, because ALL jokes disappear for huge stretches of this movie, and it’s just hunting and killing and New Zealanders being depressed on the streets of Wellington. It’s all so fucking GRIM to me, oppressively so. Even on a second viewing it made me feel sick and sad and hopeless. I love horror movies and I especially love horror comedies, but I just can’t love this one, because to me it is really neither of those things. It’s not consistently funny and just forgets any kind of humor for a whole frickin’ 45 minutes of runtime, and, if I give it the benefit of the doubt (why? But I’m going to) and assume on good faith that Taika Waititi, whose other work I love, did not actually mean to write and star in a hugely misogynist hipster incel morality play, then it doesn’t really have anything to say as a horror movie. Because that’s pretty much the psychological subtext on deck and it’s fucking disturbing all the time. At best you might be able to stretch it to women’s labor and the use of their bodies are required to create strong homosocial bonds between heterosexual men. NEAT. I’m actually having that printed on my travel coffee cup for fall. I just think it would be such a fun, kicky reference to pair with my pumpkin spice BLOOD OF MEN LATTE.

BUT IT’S DETACHED AND IRONIC CHICKMURDER, CAT, DON’T YOU SEE THAT MAKES IT POSTMODERN AND DEEP.

Sure. K. But “deep” means interrogating the implications of your own plot and characters. And you’re never really meant to dislike the core three vampires at any point. At best, all three are sometimes pretentious and lame and cringey, but you’re never meant to be disgusted by them or view them as anything but the heroes of this story. You really end up disliking Nick more than any of them, and at least he does Jackie a solid. You’re meant to sympathize with DA BOYZ. You’re meant to hope things work out for the world’s worst frat. You’re meant to want to see more of their wacky hijinks! You know, the wacky hijinks that mainly involve a group of powerful men stalking and murdering and eating women (but not men ha ha silly female, men aren’t food, they’re protagonists!)

And I remember saying: you know, this would all sit so much less unpleasantly if anyone had cared enough about anyone’s else’s to make one of the vampires a girl. Which would also just be a more interesting story and open up other plotlines and frutiful conflict within the group.

WELL, BITCHES, SOMETIMES DREAMS DO COME TRUE.

Fast forward from 2014 to 2019 and the same format, the same concept, the same character archetypes, similar sense of humor, some of the same plots, and hell, even the same theme song, and suddenly out of these comes a fantastic TV series I have nothing bad to say about. And they moved it to America! Which I would normally hate! And yet! 

The two major departures from the movie are 100% what makes the difference. And there’s a third one that’s more subtle and pervasive. And a fourth that doesn’t fix any existing problems really but is just next level brilliant. DON’T WORRY I’M GONNA TALK ABOUT ALL OF EM.

But the first one is: they made one of the vampires a girl. Because yes, that is part of how you fix a story that has Lady Problems. You get yourself a lady protagonist at the Protagonist Store IT IS NOT HARD. And hell, maybe this was done to appeal to a wider demographic with a series that would be hoped to run for a long time rather than a low-budget passion project, but there are a number of women in the writers’ room and I’d like to think someone was like: there is a better way to tell this story.

Because it’s not just any girl. It’s Nadja, and she is amazing, and she is played by Natasia Demetriou, who is also amazing. She’s easily the best part of the show, consistently gets great lines and plots, doesn’t suffer the idiots she lives with to get too far down the Viago/Deacon/Vladislav road before defusing their machismo with a devastatingly timed “meh.” She’s also the most modestly-dressed lady vampire I have ever seen on film. She’s gorgeous, but never particularly sexualized, at least any more than anyone else is, no cleavage or vampy catsuits, she dresses like a medieval Cypriot peasant who came into a lot of money which is exactly what she is. But she’s not some kind of perfect person—she’s a vampire and she kills people and her whole relationship with “Jeff,” a name I will now ALWAYS giggle at and that is ROUGH for me because that is MY DAD’S NAME, is exploitative and awful when you think about it, but so is everyone’s relationships, and that makes it not a message about men are fun and women are garbage but just about how people are garbage and I am ALL ON BOARD THAT TRAIN.

Inasmuch as the Nick character exists in the series, it’s also been gender-swapped and turned into a nerdy college LARPer named Jenna. The second I saw her, I winced and wanted to stop, I was sure she’d be the girl killed on the newspaper and I didn’t want to see that again. But…that’s not it. At all. The whole thing is fucking nigh-on endearing and suddenly has a lot to say about the invisibility of women in male-dominated geek circles and of less conventionally-attractive women in the dating market and taking responsibility for people who need you and a whole shit-ton of other subtextual reversals of predator and prey. The whole reason Nadja turns her is because she “knows what it’s like to be disrespected.” And I dare you not to feel a little warm and fuzzy when she looks in on Jenna’s window and says in the kindest and most loving voice: “Don’t worry, my darling, one day they will all be dead and we will do a shit on their graves.”  

She’s the big sister we all want on our side! The dynamic between parent and child vampire becomes downright wholesome: sisterly, sweet, a little gay (because the series yeets that squeamishness right out the gothic window and pretty much all the vampires are canonically pansexual and equal opportunity omnivores) and dare I say, kind of adorable even as they eat a dipshit sexist frat guy together. And yes, that’s still murder, but it’s not a kind of murder that accesses thousands of years of real murders just like it using language to justify the murder that actual fuckbag men have used to justify abusing and killing women since the dawn of fuckbags. It is an actual reversal of the expected dynamic. You know, comedy. The series is actually pretty careful in the early episodes to show most victims being racist or sexist or otherwise terrible before getting chomped, and it’s important to give the audience that sort of out IF YOU WANT TO MAKE A COMEDY rather than: this girl is nice and kind and wants to visit Paris watch this I’m going to fucking kill her and laugh about it.

Jenna was how I knew I could stand to watch 30 hours of something I could barely stomach 2 of before.

Nadja is fucked up and mean and selfish and hilarious and kind and murdery and shallow and loving and gross and kind of dumb just like the rest of them, and that’s what makes her a great character. You so rarely see parts like this written for women. It almost never devolves into the kind of easy stupid jokes about her as a nagging wife (her possessed doll gets those!) or withholding sex or being despised or ugly the Netflix princelings of comedy seem to think are super cutting-edge these days. She’s just part of the story--and part of what moves the story.

Natasia Demetriou also just deserves so many praises for not only holding her own with some incredibly seasoned and talented comedians but outshining them in many ways. It takes a LOT to make Matt Berry your straight man as often as she does.

And then there’s Guillermo. And everything about his character and arc is just brilliant. And everything about his character and arc shows that Jackie got fucking DONE DIRTY and didn’t deserve that birdshit plot.

Guillermo is Nandor the Relentless’s familiar. Now, there really is no one-to-one from Viago/Vladislav/Deacon to Nandor/Nadja/Laszlo, but roughly, Nandor (Kayvan Novak, so freaking good) is the Vladislav character, the higher status character, older than the others with the history of medieval pillaging and a more flamboyant sense of style—though he’s never as overtly cool as Vlad. So the familiar who will never be made a vampire because his labor is too valuable has been moved from Deacon (low status, youngest, least likable) to Nandor, gender-swapped, made into a young overweight Latino man, and perhaps most importantly, made into the narrator of the show.  The first lines are spoken by Guillermo in voice-over. He has a ton of influence over how you see every character in the show. He gets those unsettling Jackie-moments of disposing of bodies and cleaning up after the reality of blood-devourers, but his pitiful, unhappy glances to us show he’s not happy about it. He’s basically the Jim from The Office—he constantly looks to the camera and undermines the more over-the-top self-images of everyone else simply by silently noting how they treat him and what the world is really like. Guillermo is one of the only intrusions of the real world on the vampires’ mad little bubble and the only representation of young people in a house full of centuries’ old monsters. It’s also impossible not to notice from the first that the series wants to look real hard at a bunch of white people using a Latinx person as free labor on the hope of a reward that will never materialize. 

More on that in a minute.

And then he turns out to be descended from Van Helsing (and I love that this icon of European mythos is embodied and elevated by an American Latino—I like Guillermo more than I’ve ever liked Van Helsing) and reluctantly pursues his destiny as a vampire slayer. It’s an awesome slow burn of a plot that ends up being one of the few multi-episode arcs and centers Guillermo as possibly the most important character in the show.

It should tell you something that when you mention the show, the two things people will universally say/quote in response is: “Jackie Daytona” and simply the way that Kayvan Novak says “Guillerrrrmo?”

MY GOD, the juice this show gets just out of how the actors say regular everyday names! Demetriou does it with “Jeff” too! 

Ahem.

The other two major changes are Colin Robinson and a subtle shift in the aesthetic of the humor.

Colin Robinson is just…*chef’s kiss* He’s an energy vampire, which at first you think may not be as literal a thing as all the regular blood-drinking vampires. He works in offices and drains people by boring them, essentially. It’s a master-stroke because there is just SO MUCH decadent craziness going on that my man Colin grounds it all in an experience we’ve all had in real life with people we actually know—and it turns out to be just as magical an identity as any of them. The moments when you see Colin’s full power or his creepy eyes are some of the few actually scary moments because he is not playing on a familiar mythology, he is unknown and yet we all know that guy. He’s easily creepier than any of the 800 year old titans, just sitting in his room like a creep. I love him. He is the opposite of Stu. Everyone hates him, precisely because of how much he is the magicalization of That Mediocre White IT Guy.

You may notice I have not mentioned Matt Berry yet! Which is weird because I adore Matt Berry! I wish we could bottle his voice for daily personal use! How good is a show where Matt Berry is only middle of the pack in the Awesome List of Awesomeness on display? And is kind of playing a low status character most of the time? But I think he shows the last real shift, the quietest one.

The humor of What We Do in the Shadows is in contrasting the mundane and the bizarre. Vampires shopping for crepe/creepy paper in a drug store or going on dates or commenting on their lives like they’re normal and boring. Even in the language of each line, flipping between casual modern language and ancient mythical concepts. It works, it’s a great schtick. But the series doesn’t actually stick to that. It’s much warmer and more experiential than the film. Past the first few episodes, it’s not really very ironic at all, but low-key terribly sincere, full of vulnerable people screwing up at seeking and finding connection, unable to understand the world they live in or make it understand them, trying to find a place to belong and to be loved. 

There’s just a LOT more going on with the comedy. 

Part of that is simply series vs. feature film. There’s more space to fill, more ideas to explore, more time to push the characters in different directions. (The whole episode with the vampires raising the ghosts of their human selves is just brilliant worldbuilding and I’ve never seen it before, which is impressive given how overdone vampires have been. Plus, that possessed doll is FIRE and I hope the person who made it got paid SO MUCH.) But instead of certain kind of joke repeated and lengthened over two hours, in the series we get broad (BAT!) humor and subtle moments, elaborate references and dick jokes, pop culture and ancient history, rich sets and costumes and ridiculous cameos, tons of worldbuilding and tidbits that expand the lore into every possible mythical mosnter, and just vastly more emotional breadth than detached and amused or detached and dismayed. 

The fact is, Jackie Daytona could never exist in the world of the movie. It’s way too warm and sincere and loving and nobody dies. Viago might run away and run a bar, but he would never genuinely love and support and long for the success of a girls’ volleyball team. He would never try to help them and not eat them. He would never try to patch it up with Jim the Vampire and show him the quotidian wonder of coaching the team. It’s actually one of the most American episodes imaginable out of a bunch of European characters. Laszlo himself is very different than any of the film vampires—he genuinely loves Nadja and values his shared history with her. He is almost childishly excited about things and enthusiastic about the world. LASZLO IS FRIENDLY AF. He’s not hispter bored with his life, he relishes it, down to his long tiresome porn career and indeed, coaching volleyball. Everyone in the series is invested in their lives, rather than over it, and that pays for a lot.

And Jackie Daytona isn’t even close to my favorite moment of the show.

But isn’t it still a show about murdering people? Isn’t it still the same schtick of making the audience like and root for horrifying serial killers who don’t care about their victims?

Well, yes, it is.

But the changes shift the metaphor.

The changes allow it to be a metaphor at all.

And there is always a metaphor in horror. That could triple for vampire stories. Vampires are ALWAYS about society.

What We Do in the Shadows (2014) leans hard on the metaphor of vampire murder = heterosexual intercourse. It’s pretty much what vampire stories have always been, back to the Victorian era when sex among the upper classes was so forbidden and hidden that this whole genre barfed itself up out of the sheer pounds per square inch of represson. And therefore, it’s not new and it’s not interesting and it’s not fun—it’s just the same swap-out of sex for death (but only for you ladies!) that we’ve been grooving on forever. And when you combine that with a style of comedy that relies on contrast between the mundane and the bizarre, you have to look the thesis in the three-hole-punch eye and admit the implication. The existence of vampires and werewolves is the bizarre. Men harming and using women without remorse and being bored with their lives is the mundane. The movie fundamentally doesn’t work for me because I don’t consider that mundane. I consider it as out of control horrible as the existence vampires, so there’s no contrast. It’s not a speculative metaphor, it’s just how the heteronormative world sees me: as prey.

What We Do in the Shadows (2019) leans on a different metaphor. In that there is one. All the things I’ve been discussing work together to make this a story, not about misogyny, but about class on several levels.

The main vampires are old Europeans with money (if not as much as others), property, and infinite life. They have a huge mansion and no noticable source of income while Guillermo pays $1200 a month for a tiny room in it. They have the great resources of the upper classes: free time. But theirs lasts forever. Vampirism codes as wealth and status and generational power. It always has. Sex or money or both. 

They exploit Guillermo for his labor with no intention of paying him the agreed upon price for literal indentured servitude, and are almost completely non-functional without him. He is forced to deal with the grotesque reality of their idealized fantasy life where the bodies just disappear and the carpets are always clean…pretty much like wealthy white America does non-stop in the real world. Upstairs/Downstairs with a dash of Parasite, yo. Whereas when a white male familiar comes along, he treats it as a kind of tech internship, mirroring how free labor is understood and experienced along race and class lines.

But of course, Guillermo wants to be a vampire. He’s not that upset about the killing, he just wants to kill for himself, too. He doesn’t want to disrupt the existing structure, he wants to be part of it and benefit from it. Not everyone exploited person is a radical; a very real and very delicate thing to address. He is all in until a different structure presents itself as a means to achieve status—ironically, that structure being a human bloodline he did not choose but where white society derives so much of its real power, instead of a monstrous bloodline that chooses its next of kin carefully, along which fictional power flows.

THERE’S A LOT GOING ON IN THIS GIG.

And here, Guillermo gets to fight back in a way Jackie never does. His power comes from himself and his family and his hard work. He uses it righteously, to save people and kill vampires, and the powerful come to fear him while we feel the tension of knowing he’s right but liking the vampires we’ve come to know. Jackie’s power, when she finally got it, came from some guy she talked into going home with her and giving it to her, though not in a way that could ever diminish his own. And she used it to emasculate her husband.

Guillermo has agency and he punches up, and so does the whole show.

But the reason we can still like the vampires is that this dynamic gets played out over and over from different angles, with different objects and subjects. Everyone in the series is both a victim and a perpetrator of pain. (Doesn’t sound that funny, very much is.) Within the house, Nandor is a former aristocrat, Laszlo middle class, and Nadja a peasant. Colin Robinson is a classic bureaucrat, and all of them act out their class roles constantly, swapping high and low status. Nadja has a whole episode sorting out how she feels about Nandor having being the one to slaughter her whole village and family when he doesn’t even remember it among all his war crimes. Nandor tries to become an American citizen and has to confront all of the awfulness that comes at immigrants in this country. They maintain sympathy by getting regularly shit on, a bunch of weirdo nerds no one likes that much.

Stars! THEY'RE JUST LIKE THE REST OF US!

Whenever the trio leaves the house, they are always confronted by a greater vampire society in which they have very little position, if any. From the first episode with the Baron Atanas, all their finery is undermined and we understand they’re basically cringey poor-ass country cousins in the hierarchy of magical creatures that exists within the hierarchy of all living beings. The power dynamic is upended, the characters we’ve seen as strong and dominant are suddenly the lowest rung on the blood-ladder, without money or influence or respect among other vampires. We feel bad for them, because we’ve felt that ourselves. But we also feel for Guillermo, who suffers so because of their behavior. 

Our sympathies teeter back and forth, and every time we come close to hating the vampires for their actions, they do something redeeming, they stand up for Guillermo or speak kindly to him or apologize or take him flying. (Imagine Deacon speaking to Jackie even once as Nandor does to Guillermo in these moments!) They care for an ignored girl or are threatened or fall in love or release kittens or coach a volleyball team. We love all the protagonists because they are all given moments of goodness among the horror. Horror which, I cannot stress enough, can be comedic and metaphorical and detached from real death and predation because the roles of predator and prey are filled in widely varied ways, not just white straight men fucking destroying women for fun like always.

We are always a little uneasy about liking the vampire trio. We are always a little ambivalent about Guillermo doing what the good guys always do in vampire flicks. We genuinely don’t know what to feel about the end of season two, who to root for, what to hope happens, beyond the basic survival of the main characters.

This is complexity. This is the good shit. And it’s just…really fucking funny.

Jeff.

That complexity was not possible in the world of the film, and I’m so glad the series happened.

And I didn’t even mention how SPECTACULAR the opening credits are with their parade of STUNNING historical portraits! I hope Natasia Demetriou has the pre-raphaelite one IN HER BEDROOM.

Season 3 immediately, please.

BAT!