Nostalgia dictates a good deal of the entertainment we consume these days, and we may have already achieved peak 1990s nostalgia with the just-launched app game Pokemon Go. The basic premise of the game is that all of the magical creatures we first met back in the ’90s actually exist in our physical reality, and it tasks players with going on adventures around their towns in an effort to catch ’em all with a virtual Poke Ball. It’s sweeping the nation, in case you hadn’t noticed.
Not surprisingly, movie studios are now hungrier than ever to turn the Pokemon property into a feature film, which is a guaranteed money-maker if there ever was one. But why wait? Us horror fans kind of already got our own version of Pokemon Go just last year!
Directed by Adam Green, faux documentary Digging Up the Marrow stars Adam Green as Adam Green, a horror filmmaker who decides to make a doc after he’s contacted by retired police detective William Dekker (a riveting Ray Wise), a strange man who claims that he can prove that monsters exist within our world. Armed with a camera, and Dekker by his side, Green sets out on a quest to discover the truth about monsters.
And you better believe he’s intent on catching ’em all… on film.
Not unlike the world Pokemon Go presents through the lens of your smart phone, the basic gist of the universe Digging Up the Marrow inhabits is that strange creatures live in a world directly underneath our own, which Dekker calls “The Marrow,” and they only come out at night for fear of being glimpsed. Grounding the film in a commendable degree of reality, Dekker notes that these “monsters” are actually highly deformed humans hiding away from society, and like Pikachu and friends, they aren’t exactly looking to be caught.
There’s a whimsical quality to the monster designs found in Digging Up the Marrow, and that’s thanks to artist Alex Pardee. The film actually began its life when Pardee presented the world of The Marrow to Green, and it represents the very first (but hopefully not last) time that his unique creations have ever leapt off the page and onto the screen. Granted, Pardee’s monsters are decidedly more sinister than the ones found in the Pokemon universe, but they’re so bright, colorful, and cartoony that it’s not all that hard to imagine them inhabiting the same world that Charizard, Bulbasaur, and Metapod call home.
And yes, there are many different species, and they each have their own nicknames.
The amusing Pokemon Go connection aside, Digging Up the Marrow is a compelling horror movie that taps into our collective obsession with monsters, presenting a fully-realized fantasy world that’s both fascinating and surprisingly believable. At one time or another, we’ve all wished that monsters were real, and with his sixth feature, Green tapped directly into the heart of that desire. He presents himself as a giddy monster-lover who wants so badly to believe, and who he’s really playing is that monster-lover who has lived within all of us since the days when closet creatures seemed all too real.
There’s a reason we all love monsters and strange creatures so much, and since that’s currently being reflected by mainstream society to an all-consuming extent, now seems like the perfect time to either revisit or finally check out Digging Up the Marrow. It’s as much fun watching Adam Green and Ray Wise try to catch monsters as it is trying to catch them on your phone, and there are enough parallels between the game and the film that I think we can officially dub Digging Up the Marrow the unofficial Pokemon Go feature film. It’s like Nightbreed meets Pokemon, and we love it for that.
Have you seen Digging Up the Marrow? Comment below with your thoughts!
