Jabbaz substitutes something more gruesome: His highly contagious virus, which shares similarities to rabies, cause victims to act out their most sadistic impulses. These infected aren’t traditional zombies. Jim drops Kat off at work just hours before a zombie(ish) outbreak that leaves them searching for each other amid the chaos. The Sadness, loosely inspired by Garth Ennis’ Crossed comic series, follows a young couple in Taiwan, Jim (Berant Zhu) and Kat (Regina Lei). But he can’t find the proper measure of finesse and shamelessness to marry his grotesque gore and violence to, given the moral lessons he seems to think he’s obligated to offer. With The Sadness, Shudder’s new Taiwanese sort-of-a-zombie-movie, freshman Canadian writer-director Rob Jabbaz certainly wants to join the ranks of those classics. But that doesn’t mean every zombie movie has to take on big topics about the state of humanity. Ever since George Romero’s 1968 classic Night of the Living Dead turned a monster movie into a meditation on institutional racism, zombie movies have been one of the horror genre’s most effective vehicles for sociological observations: Dawn of the Dead takes down consumer culture, while Shaun of the Dead parodies the soul-killing nature of routine work and life.

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