Director’s Statement

As a fan of horror and suspense films with a genuine love for all things curious and macabre, I tend to transform light stories into much darker musings.

The kernel idea for Stained was born in the summer of 2006, when a girlfriend’s well-meaning young daughter asked why I hadn’t married yet, and if I would be terribly lonely with just my cat for company. I jokingly replied that perhaps I was psychotic, and that I would probably be eaten by my cat if I dropped dead unexpectedly. Later, the conversation made me think: the social expectations for women perpetuated in the media are so overwhelming that these young girls could conceive of no alternative reality.

With this in mind, I wrote Stained as an antidote to the idealized world presented in traditional romance. The lonely bookseller is reunited with her long-lost lover, but it becomes an obsessive and emotionally abusive affair. The best friend/sidekick was transformed into a manipulative relationship of mutual dependency. Love conquers all and everyone lives happily ever after in wedded bliss? To my mind, it IS a happy ending, but not one that’s expected.

When I finally put on my director’s hat, the first job was to find the right cast. I didn’t have a specific agenda in casting the film multiculturally, but wanted to find the right actors based only on their abilities and inner qualities. Like the script, I wanted to play with expectations and challenge the audience to forget preconceived prejudices.

Stylistically, I love the suspense and simplicity of modern Asian horror films – the sparse music, the cool desaturated palette, the minimalism of the cutting and the shots. I had wanted the shots to be well-conceived and minimalistic, deliberate in its long, wide angles. I wanted the performances to speak for themselves, and for the camera to feel like an observer in a cool, detached world.

But ultimately, filmmaking is an organic process and what you set out to do is influenced by a multitude of creative forces: the performances of your actors, your director of photography’s natural aesthetics, the settings, the tempo of your editor’s inner metronome, and the emotionality of your composer’s score. Eventually, the language of the film emerges, and it turns into the thing it is meant to be.

When I see Stained now, I realize I put more of myself onto the screen than I had ever intended, which is in itself, a somewhat horrifying realization. And although it would be nice to say that everything that is on-screen was deliberately planned and intentional, such a statement would be revisionist. The resulting film is something that both reflects the script’s original intent but was translated through a multitude of voices and talents.

Karen Lam