Taika and Jemaine unleash vampires in USA

Takia Waititi at the Sundance Film Festival world premiere of Eagle Vs. Shark. Shark in 2007.

Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement's new vampire film is heading to the prestigious and influential Sundance Film Festival next month.

But it won't be at the American event for the prestige and influence. The pair's low-budget mockumentary What We Do in the Shadows is part of of the festival's "Park City at Midnight" section, the late-night just-for-kicks part of the programme.

Its world premiere at Sundance will still be an American sales springboard for the the film which was co-directed and written by Clement and Waititi, who performed as comedy duo The Humourbeasts in the days before Flight of the Conchords.

The film follows a 2006 short of the same name by the pair which screened at the New Zealand International Film Festival.

Here's how the prototype flick was described in the NZIFF programme:

Directors Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi, assisted by fellow comedian Jonathan Brugh, explore the flatting lifestyle of three perennial bachelors, vampires Vulvis (aged 700, maybe 701), Viago (229) and Deacon (107). Listless, dandified masters of the artful sigh, they waver between trying to spook the anonymous filmmaker with their doomy tales, and making silken plays for pity. If you thought never dying might be cool, they're here to tell you about the hollowness at the core of their eternal round of irritating household chores, domestic squabbles and Saturday nights being mistaken for homosexuals in the Courtenay Quarter. Few will be impressed by their haughty approach to younger vampires, though many may admire their openness in addressing such longstanding questions as: how can any man who never sees himself in a mirror care so obsessively about clothes, hair, and skin tone?

Both of Waititi's earlier features Eagle vs. Shark (which starred Clement) and Boy were nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 2007 and 2010 respectively.