At 4 p.m. today, I saw a @News1130Radio Traffic Tweet: “Everyone slowing down @232nd to look at the movie trailers @ on side of the road: Backing up past @264th”. Not long after, someone in the neighbourhood informed me this was The CW’s midseason series Cult doing a stunt with a car facing off against a train on the tracks. Oh how I wanted to go see it for myself but ask the daily commuters how much fun it is to get from Vancouver to Langley in rush hour. On a Friday.
Cult started filming as a series two weeks ago in Vancouver but hasn’t been spotted on location in that time, as far as I know. Then today, hundreds if not thousands of drivers got a good, long look even though most didn’t know what they seeing, besides white trucks lining the road. This car versus train scene sounds like one of the reenactments by the rabid fans of the horror TV series who take their favourite show too literally. The tagline is: When the line between the imagined and reality is broken. “You have no idea how many followers are out there,” says Robert Knepper’s creepy cult leader in the show within the show in the extended promo of Cult.
Matt Davis of The Vampire Diaries (a CW example of a cult horror TV show with its own fanatical followers) stars as Jeff an investigative journalist searching for his brother whose disappearance may be linked to the fans of Cult recreating what they’ve seen on the show. Jeff enlists the help of Jessica Lucas’s production assistant.
I did see Matt Davis filming the pilot for the series last March downtown in Victory Square. And later, at a window seat in Gastown’s Alibi Room talking to someone who tells him Cult is “not just a TV show. It goes beyond that. Way beyond that.” The meta-ness of this show within a show with followers re-enacting the horrors of the show within the show is beyond me until I see it. All I know is that the many @ErnestORiley fans are hoping that I’ll see him filming again soon.