Petyr

Petyr is the oldest vampire in the household depicted in What We Do In The Shadows and the sire of Deacon. Although he is presented only briefly, his presence gives the group’s strange domestic life a deep generational structure: the vampires are not merely solitary predators but an improvised family, joined by blood, habit, jealousy, and long familiarity. Petyr’s significance lies in the contrast between the horror of his creation ritual and the almost casual affection with which the others remember him.

Identity and Place in the Household

Petyr occupies the oldest and most authoritative position among the vampires. He is Deacon’s sire, making him the figure responsible for Deacon’s transformation and, in the household’s own warped terminology, a paternal ancestor. The relationship is not treated with solemn reverence. Instead, the film presents Petyr as a member of an eccentric social unit whose supernatural age coexists with the petty rhythms of shared domestic life.

That mixture of antiquity and ordinariness is central to the character. Petyr belongs to the world of undead violence, yet his role is framed through the familiar language of family reunions and sibling rivalry. Deacon’s resentment toward Nick, the newest and least wanted addition to the vampire family, resembles the jealousy of an older brother forced to tolerate a younger sibling who has suddenly claimed the attention of the household’s parents. Petyr therefore functions as the source of both Deacon’s vampiric identity and the family tensions that follow from it.

Creation of Deacon

Deacon recounts Petyr’s transformation of him as a terrifying event stripped of any dignified mythology. Petyr flew at the sixteen-year-old Deacon, dragged him back to a dark dungeon, bit into his neck, and forced him to suck the vampire’s blood at the point of death. He then opened his wings, hovered above the newly made vampire, and screeched triumphantly. The account reduces the solemn threshold between human life and vampiric existence to an assaultive, bodily initiation: capture, bleeding, forced ingestion, and reclassification.

Yet the scene is narrated with comic delight rather than trauma alone. Petyr is sitting beside Deacon as the story is told, suddenly revealed like an unexpected guest at a daytime family reunion. The grotesque origin of Deacon’s undead life is thus placed beside the affectionate fact that the two are still friends. The juxtaposition does not erase the violence of the transformation; it makes the household’s moral disorientation more visible. A relationship founded on coercive blood exchange can nevertheless become, over centuries, an ordinary friendship within the group’s own social world.

Death and Its Consequences

Petyr is killed by a vampire hunter after Nick accidentally alerts the hunter to the vampires’ presence in the city. The event is a decisive rupture for the household. Viago, Vladislav, and Deacon are genuinely heartbroken, and their grief reveals that their apparent domestic absurdity is not merely a joke at the characters’ expense. They have formed durable attachments despite their murderous existence, and Petyr’s death removes an elder around whom those attachments were organized.

The circumstances also expose the instability of the family structure. Nick, newly turned by Petyr, is already regarded as an unwelcome intruder, while the older vampires respond to his arrival with jealousy and suspicion. When Nick’s carelessness contributes to the hunter’s discovery, Petyr’s death becomes both a consequence of the household’s failure to manage its newest member and a confirmation that vampiric kinship offers no protection from the human world. The group can laugh, quarrel, and share history like a family, but it remains vulnerable to the consequences of being undead predators.

Comic Horror and Vampiric Kinship

Petyr embodies the film’s method of turning conventional vampire imagery into domestic comedy without abandoning its violence. His attack on Deacon contains the familiar elements of vampiric conversion, but the retelling makes those elements sound like an embarrassing family anecdote. The older vampire’s wings, dungeon, bite, and forced blood exchange preserve the horror vocabulary of the genre; the affectionate presentation and the surrounding household banter transform it into a grotesque version of family lore.

Through Petyr, vampirism becomes less a solitary curse than a system of inherited relations. A sire is simultaneously creator, aggressor, elder, and friend. The blood that ordinarily signifies contamination or predation also becomes the medium through which a social lineage is established. The household’s emotional life depends on this contradiction: the vampires are capable of attachment, but their bonds remain inseparable from the violence that made them what they are.

Petyr’s death consequently gives emotional weight to the film’s broader portrait of undead normality. The vampires may spend their nights having murderous fun, raising glasses of blood, and provoking local werewolves, but grief interrupts the performance of carefree immortality. Petyr is remembered not simply as a monster or a plot device, but as a lost family member whose absence changes the emotional balance of the household.