What We Write in the Shadows
In both Bram Stoker's "Dracula" and the vampire sitcom "What We Do in the Shadows," confessionals allow the uncanny and the mundane to collide.
Two vampires sit before their interviewer. The camera is rolling.
“I was the most handsome man in our village,” the man begins.
His wife gives the camera a knowing look. “His village was very badly affected by leprosy and the plague.”
“That’s true,” he concedes. “And I myself did contract leprosy, but I was quite lucky because it couldn’t be seen. It was only one part of my anatomy—”
“Well, I can see it.”
“Anyway, one night, I was awoken by this horrible clawing at the window, and I thought, ‘Who the hell is that?’ because I live on the third floor.” He holds up three fingers in demonstration.
His wife smiles. This is the story of how Laszlo and Nadja, two of the protagonists on FX’s What We Do in the Shadows, began their romance many centuries ago.
Despite being an adolescent during Twilight-mania, I wasn’t one for vampires. Witches and ghosts? Any day of the week. But I struggled to connect with these new vampires and their brooding, love-struck melancholy.
A vampire never dies, and each generation creates its own iteration of the monster, so I wouldn’t have to wait long to explore other finely-fanged options. When I stumbled upon What We Do in the Shadows, a mockumentary-style sitcom about a group of vampire housemates living in Staten Island, NY, I finally found the right fit.
What We Do in the Shadows is based on a 2014 film of the same name, and will enter its sixth and final season later this year. The show turns the Gothic on its head: instead of inviting mere mortals to experience the uncanny, the sitcom makes the uncanny delightfully mundane. With snappy dialogue and a troop of brilliant comedic actors, the show follows our undead protagonists as they navigate the challenges of ordinary life in extraordinary circumstances. Blood-sucking escapades are followed by tense “house meetings,” as the vampires must sort out who has been improperly disposing of their victims and thus leaving the basement in “unsanitary” conditions. When a powerful vampire visits from the “Old Country,” Nandor takes his human-familiar Guillermo to a drug store—at night, of course—to shop for party decorations. “Creepy” paper (crepe paper) is the vampire’s decor of choice.
But the monstrous is truly made familiar during the characters’ interviews—like The Office, Modern Family, and more recently, Abbott Elementary, the vampires answer questions from their invisible documentary crew and share personal insights, back stories, and complaints about their housemates.
The obvious literary parallel to these diary-like “confessionals” would be Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, based on her 1968 short story and expanded into a novel in 1976. A reporter known as “the boy” interviews a vampire named Louis de Pointe du Lac, who shares his entire life story with his captivated audience. Louis may be a vampire, but he still possesses empathy and understands immortality to be a curse (unlike the vampires in What We Do in the Shadows, who revel in their vampiric identities).
However, as I finished Season Two of the sitcom earlier this week, I couldn’t stop thinking about a much older vampire tale: Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
Dracula (1897) is an epistolary novel; rather than following a traditional, third-person narrative structure, the story unfolds in diary entries, letters, telegrams, and newspaper clippings. Despite its mystical subject matter, Stoker’s novel happily makes use of the technology of his age: written during the Industrial Revolution, Stoker’s human characters employ telegraphs, typewriters, mimeographs, and dictaphones to keep track of clues as the mystery of Dracula unravels. The epistolary format allows for the Crew of Light to stage their own “confessionals,” just as the vampires Nadja and Laszlo spill their secrets on the interviewer’s sofa in What We Do in the Shadows.
This dichotomy between the novel’s subject matter and its use of an epistolary format that relies upon industrial technology illustrates what Jennifer Wicke calls the “uncanny procedures of modern life”—Dracula consumes and shares blood as the Industrial era’s evolving communication technologies consume and share information.1 What makes the plot of Dracula truly fascinating is witnessing the uncanny creep into its human characters, particularly those less obviously “marked” by vampirism, via the book’s documentary-like format.
When revisiting the text, I’m always struck by this moment in Dracula’s early chapters, in which Jonathan Harker expects to see Dracula in a mirror, and instead, sees only himself:
Suddenly I felt a hand on my shoulder, and heard the Count’s voice saying to me, “Good morning.” I started, for it amazed me that I had not seen him, since the reflection of the glass covered the whole room behind me… Having answered the Count’s salutation, I turned to the glass to see how I had been mistaken. This time there could be no error, for the man was close to me, and I could see him over my shoulder. But there was no reflection of him in the mirror!2
It’s a classic moment of “doubling,” in which characters are visually paired in ways that reveal underlying similarities, or foreshadow their intertwined narratives. (A doubling scene from another famous Gothic, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, occurs when Jane sees Bertha Mason in her bedroom mirror.) As I reflect on the confessionals in What We Do in the Shadows, I have to remind myself that I am reading this scene in Dracula not through a typical third person-narration, but through several layers of transmission: Jonathan experiences the scene, includes it in his stenographic journal, and his wife, Mina, consumes and decodes his shorthand before transmitting his writing into print via typewriter.
This prompts the question: what is lost in translation?
Countless scholars have written about Dracula as a text that explores Victorian anxieties toward a changing world: from gender roles and homoeroticism in Christopher Craft’s “Kiss Me with those Red Lips” to the interplay of faith, science, and superstition in Christopher Herbert’s “Vampire Religion.”3 It occurs to me, given the erotically-charged scenes that occur throughout the novel, that our narrators may be even more unreliable than initially presumed. When encountering Dracula’s wives, Jonathan records in his journal, via shorthand:
All three had brilliant white teeth, that shone like pearls against the ruby of their voluptuous lips. There was something about them that made me uneasy, some longing and at the same time some deadly fear. I felt in my heart a wicked, burning desire that they would kiss me with those red lips. It is not good to note this down, lest some day it should meet Mina’s eyes and cause her pain; but it is the truth.4
Jonathan acknowledges that this might hurt his future wife, Mina (the characters were still engaged at this point in the story), and yet he includes it in his shorthand account—which she will later decode and type. Are we being told the entire truth of this moment? Is Jonathan shielding us, or has Mina edited his account before we the readers ultimately receive it?
According to Jonathan (or Mina’s?) account, Dracula storms in and stops the vampire women before anything can happen. He proclaims that Jonathan belongs to him, whispering, “Yes, I too can love; you yourselves can tell it from the past. Is it not so? Well, now I promise you that when I am done with him you shall kiss him at your will.”5 This time, I find myself wondering if any details from this encounter have been edited out, either by Jonathan or by Mina.
Jonathan’s mingled desire and horror takes center stage in his dealings with vampires, but Mina lurks beneath the surface of these accounts. Much of the novel is ultimately coming from her; she takes on a secretarial role for the characters as they work to discover Dracula’s vampiric identity and ultimately put a stop to him before he can “turn” more people. Without giving too much away (I highly recommend reading the book if you haven’t already), we see Mina embody an increasingly-liminal space in the narrative. At the beginning of the novel, she represents the pure Victorian housewife, described both as a “little girl” and a “mother” to the otherwise-male Crew of Light. Yet as the group’s typist and chronicler, whose careful research plays a central role in solving the mystery, she is later praised for her “man’s brain”—a detail that she includes in the account, which as their typist, she controls.
She also includes the details of her own bloody encounter with Dracula,6 one that is mediated through Dr. Seward’s perspective via his diary, which, once again, she is typing for posterity. While I won’t spoil what happens, we are left with the unsettling realization that there is much more to Mina than meets the eye, and we are forced to accept her version of events.
As I noted earlier, the confessionals in What We Do in the Shadows allow us to learn the vampire’s secrets and thought processes. The interviews function to make them immediate, and we are warmly invited into their inner worlds, often with hilarious results. (In the first episode, we learn through confessionals that, in true vampiric fashion, both Laszlo and Nadja had an affair with the same powerful vampire from the Old Country—the one whose upcoming visit prompts Nandor to invest in party decorations.) With each interview, the uncanny monsters become a bit more human.
But Dracula’s “confessionals” have the opposite effect: the more we dive into the Crew of Light’s letters, journals, and personal accounts, the more uncanny they become. The result is an unsettling conclusion to a story that otherwise has a happy ending. Our typist, Mina, has chosen to end the story here, and I can’t help but wonder what was left out, and what might have happened next.
Jennifer Wicke, “Vampiric Typewriting: Dracula and Its Media,” ELH, vol. 59, no. 2 (Summer
1992): 467-493, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2873351.
Bram Stoker, Dracula (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2000), 56.
I’ve linked both Craft and Herbert’s essays above. You can make a JSTOR account and read both of those essays online for free, even if you don’t belong to an academic institution.
Stoker, Dracula, 69.
Stoker, Dracula, 71.
Stoker, Dracula, 322-323.
Oh man I looooove What we do in the shadows, so this was a treat! I actually attempted Dracula early into the pandemic with Dracula Daily but didn't keep up (and it's started up again in recent months). Now I'm thinking I might just have to give it another go, maybe closer to Halloween.
Really enjoyed this!