In 2014 the world was treated to the feature film comedy What We Do in The Shadows, a mock documentary of a film crew following a trio of vampires around Wellington New Zealand leading up to a major vampire celebration. It’s co-writer, Director, and one of the stars, Taika Waititi has gone on to create memorable movies such as Thor: Ragnarök and JoJo Rabbit. Here in the United States the first spin off of the successful vampire comedy was the Hulu television series What We Do in The Shadows which utilized the same mockumentary conceit but this time following three old-world vampires living in Staten Island. However New Zealand actually witnessed the first television series inspired by the mockumentary Wellington Paranormal.

Employing the same mockumentary style Wellington Paranormalfollows three officers of the Wellington Police Force as they investigate and deal with supernatural threats and occurrences in the city. The series combines the broad humor found in the original feature film with a satirical reproduction of the seriousness of programs such as COPS. The show’s principal characters are Officer Minogue partnered with Officer O’Leary played by Mike Minogue and Kate O’Leary respectively a pair of hapless but good-hearted officers hopelessly over their head in dealing with ghosts, vampires, and in the first episode of the season, demonic possession. The rough handheld camerawork mimicking the documentary style allows the series to utilized decent special effects while covering the for the television level of budget with quick pans and shaking visuals. While some of the humor is clearly based in local culture and geography and doesn’t translate to an American audience over all the series is funny and well worth the time.

Wellington Paranormal starting with the 1 season originally aired in New Zealand in 2018 plays on the CW Network with episodes becoming available on HBOMax the following day.

My sweetie-wife enjoys programming from Iceland, and this has expanded my cinematic and entertainment horizons with the latest being the enigmatic series Katla.

Katla is the largest volcano in Iceland and in the program Katla is had been erupting for a year when the first episode begins. The shows start with a woman covered in mud and ash climbing out from under the glacier and stumbling to a local station. The nearby town of Vik has been evacuated save for a few people maintaining the vulcanologists studying the eruption. The mysterious woman gives the name of a Swedish tourist who had visited Vik some twenty years earlier. Soon other strange occurrences begin happening. Dead ravens are seen alive again and people who are missing or known to be dead and buried appear in the area, again covered in the mud and ash of the eruption. The reappearance of the dead, missing, and long departed persons reopens traumatic memories and familial divisions with the people surviving the brutal conditions at the volcano’s base.

I haven’t yet finished the series and so I reserve final judgment. Endings are critical and something as atmospheric and mysterious as Katla depends heavily on a satisfying conclusion.

That said I am very much enjoying the series. It is well produced, every frame carries mood and tone far beyond the simple spoken word and the air is not only thick with ash and gas from the volcano but with tension, secrets, and menace. Katla is not an action series but one that builds slowly over its episodes as we follow disparate characters struggling with mysteries with the viewers the only ones having all the clues.

Katla is currently streaming exclusively on Netflix.

The feature film Buffy the Vampire Slayer made little impression upon the world and vanished with little notice but the television series that followed became a cultural sensation skyrocketing its show runner Joss Whedon into celebrated creator status that only recently crashed back to Earth with scandal and controversy.

Running for seven seasons, the first five being well made with the final two in my opinion suffering from turnover in the writing that’s that severely damaged the integrity of the series the series followed the trial and adventures of Buffy Summer the titular Slayer a young woman mystically selected to protect the world from demon, supernatural threats, chiefly vampires.

In the pilot episode Buffy’s watcher Giles explains that contrary to legend the world did not start out as a paradise but rather was thoroughly infested with demons who were eventually dimensionally expelled with the Slayer now the appointed guardian of the barrier between the demon dimension and our own. A clear and unambiguous refuting of Christian cosmology. (One that Whedon in the audio commentary for the episode said he expected to initiate a flood of letters and complaints that somehow never arrived.) Dismissing Christian cosmology for your won is perfectly acceptable world building and, in many cases, a preferrable one but it left the series with an unanswerable question.

Why do crosses repel vampires?

It is not because there is any actual truth behind the symbol, Gile’s ‘actual’ history dispels that possibility. It also cannot be because the user has actual faith that powers the repulsion as when it became necessary to mystically revoke a vampire invitation to Willow’s home a required element was a cross on the wall and not a symbol from Willow’s Jewish faith.

This also raises the question about historical vampires from before the common era. In pre-Christian Rome or other parts of antiquity there were slayers and vampires did the cross repel them even before the advent of Christianity?

I know that these may seem like pedantic and pointless questions. After all it was just a TV series and used as the basis for much of its mythology concepts incorporated into vampire lore from a struggling Irish stage manager and a century of horror films, but it is exactly these sort of the backstory question that bedevil my mind. I would invite you if you were writing vampire stories to ask these sorts of questions and think deeper on the why of your mythology and not simply copy and paste from a century of cinema.