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John Daniel Tangalin
Managing editor & film and television critic with a Bachelor's of Arts in English Literature with a Writing Minor from the University of Guam. Currently in graduate school completing a Master's in English Literature.
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What We Do in the Shadows‘s fourth episode of its second season is titled “The Curse;” it is directed by Liza Johnson (A Series of Unfortunate Events, Silicon Valley), and written by Sarah Naftalis.
Some spoilers ahead for those who have not yet watched the episode or seen the show. If you haven’t done either, you should get to that now, then return to this article!
This episode garners just as much if not more laughs as last week’s had. Vampire familiar Guillermo (Harvey Guillén) helps the Amateur Vampire Hunters of Staten Island infiltrate a vampire family’s home. Meanwhile, Nandor the Relentless (Kayvan Novak) receives a spam email which he has to forward to other individuals or forever be cursed. He recruits help from the other vampires to avoid a dark fate.
The main vampires’ plot in this episode — along with their interactions and usage of the computer — is highly reminiscent of Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement’s film of which the series is based. In the 2014 film, the vampires’ familiar exposes them to the new age of the technology; for example, in one scene they watch a video clip of sunrise and look in fear as bright light ascends. Guillermo’s side of the episode’s story is excellent as well. The vampire hunters have a Holy Water water dispenser and don’t know what they’re really signing up for when coming after the evils of the night.
“The Curse” has a brief reference to Sandra Bullock and several of her films such as The Blind Side, Speed, and Miss Congeniality. The episode fits the series’s vampiric theme through the inclusions of songs “Dancing in the Moonlight” by King Harvest and “The Devil Caught Me Nappin” by Andrea Litkei and Ervin Litkei. The performances of the main cast along with its secondaries are absolutely brilliant, and the writing is fantastic when it weaves the two stories together as one. This is definitely worth tuning into!
10/10
What do you think? Have you seen this series? If not, do you plan to binge it sometime in the near future? Let us know! For more What We Do in the Shadows, FX, horror, and comedy-related news and reviews follow The Cinema Spot on Twitter (@TheCinemaSpot) and Instagram (@thecinemaspot_).
Managing editor & film and television critic with a Bachelor's of Arts in English Literature with a Writing Minor from the University of Guam. Currently in graduate school completing a Master's in English Literature.
The Mosquito Club prepare to raid a suspected vampire home, while Nandor deals with the curse of a chain letter.
Tropes
- Actually Not a Vampire:
- When it turns out the mansion the Mosquito Club picked out wasn't Nandor, Nadja and Laszlo's house, Guillermo thinks that the manor might just be full of regular humans. Subverted, as it is actually is a family of vampires.
- Nandor receives a Chain Letter and he, Nadja and Laszlo think that what it says — that Bloody Mary will come and disembowel them if they don't email it to ten more people — is 100% real. The episode never clarifies if Bloody Mary exists in this world, but it is likely just a prank.
- Always Someone Better: It turns out that the whole time we thought of Nandor, Nadja and Laszlo as "the Staten Island vamps" there was a whole family of at least a dozen much more powerful, dangerous and bloodthirsty vampires living a short drive away. (Emphasis, by the end of this episode, on was.)
- Apocalyptic Log: Tonya tries to leave one, popping into a closet to talk into her helmet cam and leave a warning for the world (raising the
Fridge Logic of who, exactly, she expects to find a recording left in the vampires' house other than the vampires themselves). Unfortunately she only gets one line into it before she realizes that this "closet" is where four of the vampires happen to sleep.
- Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny!: Derek seems incapable of remembering that he's on a vampire hunt and that a vampire hunt is a serious life-or-death affair for more than a few seconds at a time. This ends up getting him (ambiguously) killed.
- The Black Dude Dies First: Guess which Mosquito Club member is left behind during the raid? A hint: it isn't the big name actor. (The idea that the vampires might go after Derek especially hard was foreshadowed in the last episode with the unsubtle hints that he's a virgin.)
- Cannot Tell Fiction from Reality: Vampires seem to struggle with this in general, but it's especially bad with their failure to understand modern technology, leading to them entering a total blind panic at a cheesy Chain Letter "curse".
- Chain Letter: Nandor tries to deal with an email supposedly sent by Bloody Mary.
- Conscience Makes You Go Back: Guillermo manages to make it out of the house unscathed, only to realize that none of the hunters are behind him and they're still in the house being tortured. He visibly hesitates before screwing up his courage for a major Big Damn Heroes moment.
- Creepy Twins: The youngest members of the vampire family, and the first ones to attack.
- Cut Apart: Guillermo suspects the Mosquito Club found his masters' house, only to be relieved that they found a different manor instead.
- A Day in the Limelight: This episode is especially notable because Guillermo's plot is, for once, very clearly the A-plot — it doesn't get more dramatic than infiltrating a cell of vampire hunters to try to stop them from slaying his masters, only to attack a completely different set of vampires and have to brutally fight his way out — while the vampires' B-plot is utterly inconsequential nonsense even for them — having to find or make up ten email addresses to pass the Chain Letter on to in order to break Bloody Mary's "curse". Lampshaded, when Guillermo comes in the door at the end of the episode covered in blood and the vampires take no notice, Nandor even berating him for taking so long on his "errand" while his master was in mortal danger.
- Disco Dan: Literally. It turns out the vampire nest the hunters stumbled upon happens to be obsessed with The '70s, the same way Nadja and Laszlo are stuck on Victorian London. The Call-Back to this episode in the Season 2 finale reveals that they went by the name "The Hustle Dynasty".
- Equal-Opportunity Evil: An early hint that this isn't the house of a typical, biologically related family is that the family portrait has about an equal number of black, white and Asian members.
- Family of Choice: Up to this point, vampires in this franchise have mostly referred to the fellow vampires that they live and hunt with as "roommates" (except for Laszlo and Nadja being a married couple). These disco vampires, by contrast, are repeatedly referred to as a "family", to the point of all posing for a group photo with chintzy '70s T-shirts saying "It's a Family Thing". The degree to which this effectively makes them far creepier than the vampires that we've met before might be a subtle Take That! to works like Twilight.
- Flipping the Bird: Guillermo gives a pair of middle fingers before jumping out the window of the vampire manor.
- The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You: As we watch Guillermo flip the double bird to the vampires and escape out the window, the vampires suddenly realize that the documentary crew are filming them and slowly turn to face them, leading to an Oh, Crap! moment followed by Shaky P.O.V. Cam of the crew themselves desperately fleeing the building.
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The Hunter Becomes the Hunted: In hindsight, it seems pretty obvious that the reason the vampires were pretending to be asleep in the middle of the night (which is the middle of the day for them) and the house was so quiet when the hunters arrived is that they knew they were coming and the hunters were Lured Into a Trap, and this isn't the first time they've done this to a bunch of humans for sport. Of course, this trope applies twice— it was very bad luck for the Hustle Dynasty (and good luck for the Staten Island Mosquito Collectors, sans Derek) that one of the hunters happened to be very familiar with vampires and to have Van Helsing blood run through his veins.
- Incredibly Lame Pun: An extremely predictable punchline that's nonetheless worth it for the sheer commitment the actors bring— Nadja tries to just make up an email address for Bloody Mary ("") and send the letter back to her as a way of Cutting the Knot, only to have an extreme Freak Out when this gets a reply from a "mailer-daemon".
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Know-Nothing Know-It-All: Laszlo gets plenty of opportunities to show off his bullshitting skills in this episode, lording his (nonexistent) relative expertise about how both curses and the Internet work over Nandor and Nadja. Especially hilariously grating is the
Running Gag of him constantly "reminding" them about the story of Bloody Mary ripping out the guts of a teen girl named Ariana, a story he read from the same email they did with them standing right there.
Nadja: Where are we supposed to get ten emails from, the email store?
Laszlo: No, no, they'll probably be closed this time of night.
- Let's Get Dangerous!: We've known since the end of the last season that Guillermo had the blood of a true vampire slayer running through him; this episode is the first time he really gets to show it.
- Motor Mouth: Shanice is an awkward nerd who's prone to rattling off inane trivia when she's under stress, like starting to name constellations for no reason while staring at the glowing star stickers on the vampire children's ceiling. (Many fans have pointed out that she seems to share this trait with, of all people, Colin Robinson.)
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P.O.V. Cam: The hunters set themselves up with helmet cameras to document the raid on the vampire house, giving us the opportunity for some really scary shots from their perspective of the vampire attack. (This does, of course, raise the usual
Fridge Logic questions of why this would be necessary, given that the Mockumentary crew apparently also diegetically exist and go in with them.)
- Soundtrack Dissonance: The '70s vampire family begin playing an upbeat disco song ("Don't Leave Me This Way" by Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes) as peppy mood music for torturing and killing the hunters.
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Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: The Mosquito Club is primarily made up of a bunch of kids with a zealous enthusiasm for vampire killing but no professional training, so when they try to raid a vampire's home, they are made playthings by the various vampires dwelling there, despite the sheer number of crosses and stakes they have on
them, and Guillermo has to save all of them.
- The harshest moment of this is when the hunters are sitting morosely in the van nursing their wounds in silence, and Tonya finally brings up that they still have to bring the van back to Derek's mom (and, presumably, come up with some way to tell her that her son is dead).
- Take That!: One of the only two emails in Nandor's inbox is a Fandango invitation to a free screening of The Blind Side, which leads Colin Robinson to go off on a tangent naming Sandra Bullock movies, which Nandor just stares blankly at until Colin mentions Practical Magic, at which point he hisses FURIOUSLY as though burned. (Possibly Foreshadowing for the plot of "Witches".)
- Uncertain Doom: The last we see of Derek is him being snatched by a vampire from above and pulled offscreen. As of Season 2's ending, we have no confirmation of his fate,
with a lot of fans pulling for him to turn out to have been sired as a vampire. (Although that would raise Fridge Logic questions of why as of the finale there were no vampire witnesses to testify to the Council that Guillermo, not the trio, was responsible for the vampire deaths in this episode.)
- Whoosh in Front of the Camera: One of the vampires pulls this classic move while Derek is obliviously checking out their record collection.
- Would Hurt a Child: The Mosquito Collectors are introduced in this episode swearing an oath to kill any vampire they see, even if it looks like a helpless old person or a baby. Later on Guillermo does, in fact, have to stake a pair of prepubescent Creepy Twins, although he shouts "Sorry!" after doing so.