Nightmare Fuel / The Sadness

”Handsome Boy!”

Get comfortable and have a barf bag on hand, because this page is going to take you on a ride.

All spoilers are unmarked. Read at your own discretion.

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• The people infected by the Alvin Virus are this by default, given that being infected comes with Black Eyes of Evil and a Slasher Smile, and that doesn’t even get into the way they act.
  • One of the more specific examples is The Old Lady, who is both the first of the infected we meet and acts as the page image. On top of the above mentioned traits, she also has a mouth full of swollen gums and discoloured teeth, and is covered in blood for some reason even before she gets started.
    • Worse still, Dr. Wong theorizes that the reason the infected people are crying is because they’re still lucid but completely unable to control themselves.
• The scene in the restaurant is palpable with dread because you just know something bad is about to happen, starting with The Old Lady slowly making her way through as a blurry figure behind Jim. She then dumps hot fry oil over some poor workers head and drags her nails through his melting face. When she rounds on Jim, it’s almost a relief when she gets run over... by another infected, who gleefully laughs "that bitch came out of nowhere!"
  • Through her, we also get an early look at how the infection spreads. She demonstrates by spitting… something into the mouth of a concerned bystander, who, in his very next scene, is stabbing his own brother in the middle of the restaurant.
• Emergency services aren't immune to the Alvin Virus, either. While Jim is trying to regain his composure in the supposed safety in his apartment, he hears, over an emergency loudspeaker, a dispatcher gleefully announcing that all men will be castrated and all women will be raped by stray animals. Even when there's no one to hurt, the infected will still find a way to be horrible people.
• Right after Jim hears that announcement, his neighbor ambushes him with a pair of hedgeclippers and casually chews on his severed fingers, happily informing Jim that he'll be the one pleasuring his girlfriend from now on. Brrrr...
• A man has his arm held over a concrete step where it is then stomped so hard it breaks in half.
• The Subway. It starts simply enough, with Kat being annoyed by handsy old man as she sits alongside the other commuters. We then see a man in sunglasses start crying, which is seemingly his cue to start stabbing people at random. By the time he’s restrained, there’s so much blood that people's shoes are audibly squeaking. While he’s maniacally asking if he’s “beaten the record” after stabbing 5 people to death (a reference to the 2014 Taipei Metro stabbing, where 4 people died), another person starts stabbing people. Then another. And another. Before anyone can make sense of what’s happening, the subway car becomes a bloodbath; people are biting each other, the businessman stabs a woman named Molly though the eye, several people are raped onscreen and the only thing anyone can do is try not to be noticed because they’re all trapped in the train car. When it finally reaches its stop, the only people who aren’t dead or infected are covered in gore and running away in a blind panic.
  • The Businessman is unsettling even before he gets infected, given his lack of respect for Kats boundaries and how offended he gets at her obvious irritation with him. It’s also worth noting that, out of all the infected, he’s the only one who doesn’t seem to be crying, which would certainly put his behaviour in a darker light than even the other infected.
    • Of course, when he actually is infected, he’s no treat to deal with either. He’s certainly the most focused we see, only getting distracted from his pursuit of Kat when he kills or assaults someone he finds while searching for her, as demonstrated with the random stranger he kills in the subway or with what he does to Molly, all while spewing the most revolting sentences a person can think of.
• One of the hospital workers says that a little girl was burned alive by one of the infected.
• The President of Taiwan attempts to make a statement on an emergency broadcast, only for one of his aides to stuff a live grenade in his mouth and reveal the real extent of just how utterly fucked the country is. And then The Businessman shows up…
• Jim coming across a group of infected kids happily ramming a man's groin into a pole wrapped with barbed wire. When Jim rescues the poor bastard, he complains that he was enjoying his torture.
• Jim hallucinating a floating mannequin head wagging its tongue at him. The first sign that something is very, very wrong with him.
• A wheelchair bound Molly gets infected when The Businessman rapes her eye socket. And he brags about it to Kat. Later on, Molly, with the help of other infectees, gleefully castrates the man who almost locked her out of the hospital with a bonecutter, boasting that she finally made some new "friends" in life while sporting one mother of a Slasher Smile.
  Molly: I guess I just needed to find the right people. (revs up the bonecutter)
• The infected staff and patients having a straight up orgy in the hospital.
• Just before he is finally, finally killed, the Businessman smiles at Kat, saying that she's just like him now: "violent and depraved."
• Dr. Wong is revealed to have killed several newborns and he isn’t even infected. The worst part is his assertion that it was a Mercy Kill actually holds water because it really is better than whatever the infected would have done.
  • Less justifiably, Kat discovers that Wong injected one of them with the Alvin Virus so that he could always have a fresh supply for testing. He then injects Kat with it to see if she’s immune. He then kills the infected baby…
  • Dr. Wong becomes infected after having his severed foot puked on by another victim. Just before he bleeds out, he admits that he enjoyed killing the newborns.
• While Kat is dragging a wounded Dr. Wong so they can get to the extraction helicopter, they run into Jim, who Kat had informed of their location. This should be a good thing, but Jim is infected. This leads to Jim getting wounded, killing Wong and attempting to kill Kat, who narrowly avoids him by locking a gate between them. While she tries to talk to him, all he can do is tell her about how much he wants to cut off her tits. The film ends when Kat, a mentally degraded wreck by this point, making her way up to the roof, where muffled gunfire and screaming can be heard as the camera zooms in on Jim’s dying face, still smiling as he bleeds out.
• And all of this carnage, slaughter and depravity happened in one country and in one day. If one of the President's top brass can get infected, who's to say that the Alvin Virus won't spread to mainland China? Or Japan? Or the United States? Or the rest of the world? And what would happen if the infection spread to people in charge of extremely sensitive information, like nuclear launch codes? What happened in Taiwan may be the fate of the entire human race...
  • Not to do with The Sadness but in its' inspiration, Crossed, not only does the virus emerge in every single country at the same time, but the threat of infected people with access to nuclear weapons is actually a plot point.