LAST DECEMBER, the final episode of What We Do in the Shadows (2019–24) aired on FX, ending a lauded six-season run. Spun off from Taika Waititi’s 2014 film of the same name, the show—presented as a mockumentary, à la The Office—focused on a group of bickering, incompetent vampires living together as roommates on Staten Island. During that time, the characters were pitted against werewolves, a siren, and the Jersey Devil, alongside far more mundane but no less challenging threats like spam emails, city council meetings, and a weekend trip to Atlantic City. Through it all, the program was invested in the idea that vampire stories are, at their core, immigrant stories.
English author Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula, which provided the template for the modern vampire, opens with the hapless Jonathan Harker saying of his trek from Germany to Transylvania to visit the count, “The impression I had was that we were leaving the West and entering the East.” The historical figure upon whom Stoker’s character is very loosely based, Vlad Țsepes, was a border prince on the Western side of the late-medieval divide between Christendom and the Muslim world, and is now a Romanian national hero credited with keeping the Ottoman Empire from conquering his native region of Wallachia. By the time Harker visits in the late nineteenth century, the boundary has shifted, putting Romania firmly on the other side of the aforementioned divide. The fundamental foreign otherness of the count serves as a launch pad for the story’s anxieties regarding “reverse colonization.” The British Empire, built on centuries of invasion and occupation, was plagued by the fear that one of those “lesser peoples” from a far-flung corner of the world might infiltrate their ranks and do to them what they had done to others for so long. Thus, Dracula is an amalgam of otherness—the enemy without—whose journey to Great Britain and embrace of Britishness mark him as a singular and palpable threat.
WWDitS, in its comedic (and far less xenophobic) way, is a similar sort of immigrant tale. Two of its four vampire roommates are notably foreign: Nadja (Natasia Demetriou) is a Romani woman from the Greek isle of Antipaxos, coded with the border anxieties of nineteenth-century Romania, while Nandor the Relentless (Kayvan Novak) is the leader of the fictional and long-since-dissolved Ottoman emirate Al Qolnidar (ostensibly located somewhere in modern-day Iran). The remaining two are playful spins on what it means to be other. Matt Berry’s Laszlo Cravensworth is a ridiculous parody of English nobility and foppishness, a sort of Lord Byron by way of Benny Hill. Mark Proksch’s “energy vampire,” Colin Robinson, is a pastiche of whiteness—a creature so encrusted with the totems of doughy, WASPy, middle-class blandness that he is alienating even to those he most closely resembles; he has the appearance and mien of the cartoon office schlub Dilbert, paired with the dubious morals of the character’s creator, Scott Adams.
The original film, set in Waititi’s native New Zealand, presented vampires as affably clueless outsiders navigating a world that more or less embraced them. But the show, set in the United States of the past six years, posits that an immigrant narrative is, necessarily, a story about struggling to fit within a culture that despises you. Nandor’s human servant, Guillermo de la Cruz (Harvey Guillén), can serve as household interlocutor only in that, as a larger-bodied, gay Chicano and child of immigrants, he understands what it’s like to be an other in the US. His desire to eventually become a vampire is a fantasy of what it would be like to be powerful, given that being fully accepted for who he is isn’t a possibility. When, in the penultimate season, he finally makes the transition, only to realize that he really doesn’t want it, the metaphor is clear: There isn’t a magic bullet to cure America’s obsession with scapegoating the other, as even supernatural powers can’t make one acceptable.
Kristen Schaal, playing the Guide—a functionary from the Vampiric Council’s Staten Island outpost—attempts to bring closure to the documentary in the show’s finale, voicing a strong belief that America has changed this family of immigrants for the better and vice versa. The sentiment is playfully and pointedly undercut by having Schaal’s monologue devolve into a xenophobic, MAGA-adjacent screed. The dark days of a second Trump administration have forced Americans to reckon with what it means to live in a country where the heroic mythology of its inception is at odds with its violent vision for the future. WWDitS reminded us that there was family, friendship, and no shortage of laughter to be found on the margins of such a nation—even in the bleakest of times, even among the most monstrous of people.
Tyler Dean holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Irvine, and is a professor of literature at a number of Southern California colleges. He teaches courses on vampires, Victorian novels, and the Gothic.
