If you’ve not seen Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement’s hilarious 2014 New Zealand vampire mockumentary masterpiece What We Do in The Shadows, you owe it to yourself to correct that.
It’s one of the funniest films of the last ten years, a ridiculously deadpan tale of centuries-old bloodsuckers sharing a flat in Wellington. Starring Waititi, Clement and Rhys Darby, it’s incredibly silly, occasionally really violent, endlessly quotable (“If you are going to eat a sandwich, you would just enjoy it more if you knew no one had fucked it”) and really charming.
Waititi has become a vastly bigger deal in the time since WWDITS came out, with Hunt for the Wilderpeople (which is also amazing, and if you don’t cry at, you’re a fucking robot) grossing more than any New Zealand film in history and Thor: Ragnarok making bazillions.
He’s now busy as all hell, making an animated movie about Michael Jackson’s pet chimp Bubbles, reportedly working on an adaptation of Akira, and dealing with an ‘informal offer’ of the chance to make a Star Wars installment.
But, he’s still eager to revisit the world of WWDITS. There’s a sequel in development, focusing on the lycanthropic characters from the first one, called We’re Wolves.
Just think about how good that title is for a moment. That title is funnier than some whole movies.
And details have now come out about a TV spin-off from the first movie. Titled Wellington Paranormal, it’s a documentary-style series following two members of the Wellington Police’s X-Files-esque division - the two police officers who were hypnotised by Waititi’s character in the first film to not spot the gory goings-on in the vampires’ flatshare. The two blurry ones on the right:
Original cast members Mike Minogue and Karen O’Leary are reprising their roles, and other characters from the film are said to show up, including Nick, the newly-transformed vampire who spends the film introducing himself to women as ‘Twilight’.
There are six episodes of Wellington Paranormal airing on TVNZ2 sometime in the middle of next year, but hopefully/presumably some channel or streaming service over here will pick it up. Go on. It’ll be really funny.
(Images: Resnick Interactive Development)
