Review: What We Do in the Shadows, “Hybrid Creatures” | Season 5, Episode 7
This season’s “one winner, one just okay” pattern more or less continues, but the titular monsters are pretty amazing
Let’s talk about an element of comedy that can be—as Laszlo would put it—a “complex pro-see-dee-yerrrr.” I am referring here to grotesquerie, a specific kind of gross-out humor. Most raunchy comedy plays to our collective adolescent fascination with bodily functions and the like. Grotesquerie, on the other hand, shows us things that are as strangely beautiful as they are disgusting.
In this week’s What We Do in the Shadows episode “Hybrid Creatures,” Lazlo introduces Guillermo to his laboratory full of “tiny Gizmos”—an assortment of human-animal hybrids that the vampire has bred from the familiar’s secretions. According to Laszlo, these things are—like Guillermo himself—“what the scientific community would call a lost cause, with no hope what-suh-ever.”
I had a range of reactions to these hybrids, I have to admit. They are, in the original sense of the word, awesome. The goat-boy, the rabbit-boy, the fish-boy… An impressive amount of creativity went into the combin…