Season 4 of What We Do in the Shadows ended with a killer cliffhanger. Guillermo (Harvey Guillén), finally fed up with waiting for Nandor to turn him into a vampire, goes to his friend Derek with a bag of money. In exchange for the money, Guillermo demands that Derek turn him. It seems like a simple enough exchange—hell, for that much cash, I’d do a little blood swap with a buddy!—but as we know, nothing ever works out the way it’s supposed to in the vampiric world. When season 4 came to a close, there was no telling what might happen to Guillermo.
When the season 5 trailer dropped, revealing that Guillermo’s transformation isn’t going as planned, my first theory was that Derek had just tricked him into believing he’d been turned. After all, Nandor’s been stringing Guillermo along for 12 years, so Guillermo isn’t the most discerning guy.
But no—in the season 5 premiere, which is now streaming on Hulu, we clearly see Derek do the deed. In a fantastically bloody scene, Derek nicks Guillermo’s carotid artery, and Guillermo takes a sip from Derek’s wrist. After collapsing from blood loss, Guillermo wakes up with glowing yellow eyes. Something has definitely happened to him.
But what, exactly? Guillermo can still eat human food and go out in the daylight. He can’t fly, and when he tries to turn into a bat, he just gets huge bat ears. So what’s going on here? Is his Van Helsing ancestry perhaps interfering with the transformation?
Guillermo quickly finds out that there’s not much he can do to speed things up. He can’t confide in Nandor, since turning someone else’s familiar is apparently a deadly taboo in vampire culture. Guillermo learns that a do-over isn’t an option, when Baron Afanas has Derek try it with another recently turned vampire. The poor dude doesn’t turn into some kind of double vampire. He just explodes in a spray of blood.
Oh, Guillermo. Honestly, who hasn’t been in this position? You try to become a vampire, you think you do everything right, and then, for infuriatingly opaque reasons, it just doesn’t work? I’m not saying that’s happened to me—I mean, I’m definitely not going to put in writing that I’m a vampire’s familiar waiting for my illicit transformation to take hold—but we all know that feeling, right? You finally get medication for a chronic illness, and it doesn’t do anything? Or you realize, two hours into the party, that the edible you took was a dud? We’ve all been there.
Guillermo has always been the most relatable character on What We Do in the Shadows. He just wants to fit in. He wants the glamorous lifestyle he’s spent years watching from the outside. All too often, he succumbs to wishful thinking, pursuing his dream of becoming a vampire even as he’s confronted with the reality of petty vampiric politics and aging familiars. We feel you, dude!
I want only the best for Guillermo … but somehow, I have a feeling that he isn’t going to get it quite yet.
