Wellington, New Zealand, is the nondescript suburban setting of What We Do In The Shadows, where centuries-old vampires share a house and treat the practical inconveniences of undeath as ordinary domestic problems. The city’s decisive significance lies in this collision between familiar urban life and supernatural longevity: Wellington becomes a stage on which manners, friendship, hierarchy, feeding, and murderous history are rendered as the everyday concerns of outsiders trying to live together.

Setting and Domestic World

What We Do In The Shadows places its vampires in a shared house in a Wellington suburb rather than in a castle, crypt, or remote ancestral estate. The unremarkable setting deliberately strips vampirism of conventional grandeur. The house is not an emblem of aristocratic isolation but a pressured domestic environment in which immortal beings negotiate rooms, visitors, blood, and one another’s habits. Their supernatural condition is therefore framed through the recognizable structure of a shared household.

The mockumentary form intensifies the effect. A camera crew follows the residents through their lives, presenting their confused moral code as the ordinary rhythm of people who are simply trying to get on with their existence. The city’s apparent normality makes the vampires’ conduct more disorienting: murderous amusements, blood-drinking, and centuries of accumulated violence coexist with the social awkwardness and practical routines associated with suburban flatmates.

The Vampires of Wellington

Viago von Dorna Schmarten Scheden Heimburg, a 379-year-old dandy, defines himself through good manners. His age and undead status might suggest a figure of ancient menace, yet his most conspicuous concern is politeness. Deacon Brucke, described as the youngest of the group at only 183 years old, supplies a contrasting mixture of youthful self-importance and historical monstrosity. He recalls having been a Nazi vampire during the Second World War with wry bemusement, acknowledging that the Nazis lost the war without displaying any comparable recognition of the horror of his own past.

Petyr occupies the oldest position in the household’s hierarchy and is Deacon’s sire. Their relationship is presented as a source of comic familial pride. Deacon recounts Petyr attacking him, biting his neck, forcing him to drink vampire blood, and thereby transforming him; Petyr then appears beside him like an unexpected guest at a daytime family-reunion programme. The grotesque origin of their blood relationship is converted into an occasion for affection and shared amusement, a characteristic Wellingtonian inversion of vampire mythology.

Manners, Feeding, and Violence

Viago’s treatment of a new victim exposes the household’s moral absurdity most clearly. He tells the camera that he likes to show victims a good time, adopting the expression of an innocent, cheerful young man even while preparing to kill. When a young woman sits on the sofa discussing her future, Viago smiles and encourages her, but lays newspaper beneath her in order to protect the upholstery from blood. The gesture is domestic, tidy, and considerate in form; its purpose is murderous. Wellington’s suburban space makes the contrast unavoidable, turning a household chore into evidence of predation.

The vampires’ conviviality does not soften the consequences for the humans around them. Across the centuries, the friends are shown having murderous fun, raising glasses of blood toward the camera and partying as if there will be no tomorrow, even though many of the humans they encountered did not survive. The city thus contains a community whose internal warmth and external danger are not opposites. Friendship, celebration, and violence occupy the same social world.

Narrative and Cultural Significance

Wellington allows the film to revise the established image of the vampire without abandoning its central threat. Earlier vampire traditions emphasized elegant predators, nocturnal secrecy, and the aesthetic distance of castles or ruins; the Wellington household relocates those elements into a modern suburb and makes them objects of observational comedy. The vampires remain killers, but the narrative asks the audience to watch their arguments, manners, memories, and social relationships as though they were the problems of ordinary residents.

This setting also makes the vampires figures of outsider identity. Their confused morality is treated as normal within the household, while the surrounding human world becomes the environment they must navigate, deceive, and periodically consume. Wellington’s apparent blandness is therefore productive rather than incidental: it lets the story place the extraordinary beside the everyday until the boundary between domestic normality and monstrous behaviour becomes both funny and unsettling.

The broader history of vampire representation supports this transformation. Modern literary and screen vampires can be sympathetic, comic, openly social, or otherwise far removed from traditional monsters. In Wellington, that freedom becomes a collective household identity. The city does not merely host vampires; it supplies the ordinary civic and domestic surface against which their immortality, manners, hierarchy, and violence can be made visible.