Whether or not vampires are real -- and the Internet seems divided on the topic -- New Zealand filmmakers Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi managed to generate about 120 hours of footage in their efforts to document the everyday lives of a group of bloodsuckers sharing a flat in Wellington.

Co-directors, writers and stars Taika Waititi, left, and Jemaine Clement appear in a scene from the vampire mockumentary "What We Do in the Shadows." Photo provided

“We had the idea 10 years ago, and it was kind of just mainly addressing things you wonder about vampires but you don’t see ‘cause the stories aren’t usually from their point of view,” Clement said. “They’re from the point of view of the vampire hunter or the victims or the township who’s being drained of blood.”

But their uproarious "What We Do in the Shadows" is a delightfully deadpan fake documentary colorfully chronicling the lives of the undead. Released Tuesday on Blu-ray and DVD, the 2014 Sundance Film Festival selection has been credited with infusing fresh blood into the increasingly stale vampire genre, but it actually predates many of fang-bearing films it sends up.

“There’s two of us who wrote it, and I wanted to do a vampire movie and Taika was thinking about a mockumentary. And we thought they went well together because that’s something you couldn’t really document. That was in 2005: There were a lot less vampire movies and mockumentaries then,” Clement said last week by phone from Los Angeles.

“By the time we started to go and try to find money to make it, vampires were -- quotation marks -- hot. So even though they didn’t know what kind of vampire movie we were making -- where the vampires weren’t gonna be hot -- it was right in the middle of that vampire fever when we were trying to put the project together.”