This paper uses What We Do in the Shadows as a way of thinking about Hollywood’s haunted margins: the spaces where labor circulates widely without receiving full visual or institutional recognition. Voice acting becomes central to the argument because it concentrates a contradiction between vocal authority and bodily invisibility.
In this framing, Staten Island is not only a comic setting but a spatial allegory for the industry’s deferred zones of legitimacy. The mockumentary form intensifies that reading by turning confession, narration, and constant speech into a structure for asking who gets heard, who gets seen, and who remains usable without being fully recognized.
The project treats vampirism less as a generic metaphor for difference than as a way of exposing a representational economy built on audibility, misrecognition, and managed invisibility.