The Stranger is participating in Scarecrow Video’s Psychotronic Challenge all month long! by Hannah Murphy Winter 1. JUMP-OFF POINT: Kick off the challenge festivities by watching a movie that inspired a TV series. What We Do in the Shadows It’s Best in Show, but make it vampires. Created by (and starring) Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi, this mockumentary follows four vamps sharing a flat in Wellington, New Zealand. The roommates fight about who hasn’t done the dishes in five years, how to use eBay, who’s failing to clean up their human remains, and who invited a vampire hunter into the house.  Clement and Waititi wrote over 100 pages of script, but didn’t show it to anyone in the cast and crew, so it’s almost entirely improvised. (Classic lines include: “We’re werewolves, not swear-wolves!”) They shot 125 hours of footage, and edited it down into 90 minutes of gold.  Honorable mention: Buffy the Vampire Slayer. There’s camp. There’s cheerleading. There’s Pee-wee Herman as a vampire. (Paul Reubens says he modeled his character after his mugshot, because, he said, “it’s the coolest I’ve ever looked.”) In spirit, it’s almost nothing like the TV show, but it can almost be treated like its prequel. The Stranger is participating in Scarecrow Video’s Psychotronic Challenge all month long! Every October, Scarecrow puts together a list of cinematic themes and invites folks to follow along and watch a horror, sci-fi, or fantasy flick that meets the criteria. This year, Stranger staffers are joining the fun and we’re going to share our daily recommendations here on Slog! Read more about Scarecrow’s 2024 challenge—and get the watch list—here. And you can track our daily recommendations here! 💀