WhatCulture Horror presents a selection of classy genre movies, which are all too often mistakenly overlooked. These 10 films should be classed as cult classics, the 13-minute featurette argues, but aren't.
It's an interesting selection, although I firmly believe that the number one film, Near Dark, is a cult classic. I certainly regard it as such.
Known for horror movie series like Hatchet and Frozen, director Adam Green (playing himself) receives a wad of information in the mail from a fan who claims to have discovered real monsters.
Green decides this would be a brilliant subject for a documentary and heads out to meet the mysterious William Dekker (Twin Peaks' Ray Wise) and hopefully get a chance to see these so-called monsters.
Dekker spins him yarns about a subterranean world - accessed through holes in the ground usually found near cemeteries - called 'the Marrow', populated by an assemblage of deformed creatures.
Shot in a mock-documentary style (with swatches of 'shaky hand-held camera footage'), the film follows the childishly-excited Green and his sceptical cinematographer, and long-time collaborator, Will Barratt (also playing himself) as they interview Dekker and are then taken on a series of night-time reconnaissance missions, staking out an alleged Marrow entrance.
Along the way, there are several cameos from known-genre figures (such as Kane Hodder, Mick Garris and Green's ex-wife Rileah Vanderbilt) who don't get what he is trying to achieve with this documentary and generally dismiss Dekker as a potentially-dangerous nutter or a con man.
This is more than a simple "what if monsters really existed?" movie, as a key element in the tale is that that question is being tackled by a horror movie director whose career is based on creating terrifying creatures.
The mockumentary is joyously incomplete, dangling plot threads that are never truly explained (such as the chronology of whatever is in Dekker's locked storeroom), but that's life. And the movie's brilliant ending justifies wholeheartedly why Green left his magnum opus unfinished.
I get why some people don't grok this. They're wrong. But I get it. Digging Up The Marrow is a slow burner, building up to its kick-in-the-teeth third act. Sure, there's a pretty terrifying jump scare about half-an-hour in, but the bulk of the film is about building atmosphere and creating a world.
I can only imagine that a lot of people - coming off the back of the Hatchet franchise - were caught off-guard by how subtle and intelligent Digging Up The Marrow is.
Thematically it owes a lot to the more-grounded tales of HP Lovecraft's oeuvre (particularly his "ghouls") and, of course, Clive Barker's Nightbreed, but the documentary style gives it a verisimilitude that is only undermined by the presence of such a recognisable actor as Ray Wise in a lead role.
Wise is superb, wholly convincing as the shady and driven Dekker, and I understand why Green cast him - to stress that this is 'make-believe' and not an attempt at a Blair Witch-style hoax. Yet I can't help but wonder how the film would have been received if Green had gone down that route with an unknown actor as Dekker.
In reality, Digging Up The Marrow came about because of a fortuitous confluence of events in Green's life. First, he received a highly detailed package of notes from a fan claiming to be the real story of Green's creation, Victor Crowley (from the Hatchet series).
Later the film director met artist Alex Pardee who gave him a booklet of illustrations for his exhibition Digging Up The Marrow that told the story of detective William Dekker commissioning him to draw creatures he'd encountered in his investigations of the Marrow.
After a year of combating a pandemic with relatively benign, cold-like, symptoms, the frustrated populace of Taiwan - many considering the virus a hoax perpetuated by the government or big business - finally lets its guard down.
This is when the Alvin virus spontaneously mutates into a rabies-like plague, unleashing its victims' inner demons.
As random acts of violence begin to break out across the city, the streets of Taipei escalate into an orgy of brutality and depravity, as those infected are driven by their most primitive desires to commit the most extreme acts of cruelty and depravity they can imagine.
A young couple, Jim (Berant Zhu) and Kat (Regina Lei), find themselves separated in the chaos.
Kat was taking the underground to work when the rioting began, while Jim was getting his morning coffee at a local café.
Trapped between the trigger-happy authorities and tidal waves of ordinary people transformed into psychotic killers, as personified by the lecherous businessman (Tzu-Chiang Wang) who stalks Kat, The Sadness follows Jim and Kat on their separate odysseys, as they attempt to survive and reunite.
A strikingly memorable 99-minute movie, The Sadness is the first feature film of Canadian writer/director Rob Jabbaz, who works out of Taiwan, and, if nothing else, signals the arrival of a major new horror talent on the scene.
It needs to be stated up front that this is not a film for the overly sensitive, easily triggered, or faint of heart, as it very quickly descends into epic Grand Guignol, with spraying blood and viscera decorating many a scene.
The early subway sequence is simultaneously over-the-top and terrifyingly real in its depiction of human ferocity in a confined space that you may never want to travel on a tube train again.
The Sadness is George Romero's 1973 film The Crazies cranked up way past 11, with its pseudo-zombie infected retaining their intelligence and ability to communicate but with no filters, no restraint holding them back.
Like something from a Clive Barker splatterpunk opera, the plot of The Sadness is about those grim, dark thoughts we all experience upon occasion - but would never act upon - being made manifest.
The mutated Alvin virus eliminates those social contracts of human civilization, allowing the most evil and sadistic part of a person's id to take the driving seat.
With Jabbaz's commitment to the verisimilitude of the plague he has created at the heart of The Sadness, sexual violence is threatened (often) and suggested throughout the film, but never graphically shown.
The harrowing nature of the horror is heightened from more mainstream zombie outings because the fast-moving infected can still talk, issuing vulgar taunts and gross threats of their intentions.
These plant disturbing images in the viewer's mind which never manifest on camera, but help accentuate what we do see: the boundary-challenging display of dismembered, often cannibalised, bodies, severed limbs, torn flesh etc
The titular "sadness" is both from the realisation that the infected know what they are doing, but can't stop themselves (which is why some of them are seen crying before or after their attacks), and also the psychological effect this scenario has on those not yet affected by the virus.
As the gorefest snowballs, the uninfected are pushed to shocking acts of violence in self-defence, so that eventually it's difficult to differentiate between the infected and uninfected.
Some of the manic momentum of The Sadness is lost towards the end of the second act, during a key scene that (necessarily) exposits the backstory of the virus and how it works, before the story turns inwards for its conclusion, bringing the drama down to a very intimate level.
It gradually becomes clear, as the movie enters its third act, that we are not heading towards a happy ending, rather something far more nihilistic that borrows a trick from a particularly famous zombie movie (just styling it differently).
As infection/zombie tales go, The Sadness is not so much a film of be enjoyed, as it is an experience.
What you make of that experience depends on your intestinal fortitude and willingness to watch a brilliantly shot survival horror film set against a bleak, misanthropic, backdrop of disgusting cruelty being perpetrated by the worst of humanity.
However, The Sadness isn't simply a bloodbath of mindless violence (although there is rather a lot of that), the script also cleverly addresses - very topically - the seemingly modern phenomena of social media-fuelled paranoia and politicised truth that surrounds wide-spread emergencies, such as pandemics.
My pop culture Odyssey: a slice of super-powered geek life with heavy emphasis on pulp adventure, superheroes, comic books, westerns, horror, sci-fi, giant monsters, zombies etc
