Karen Lam doesn’t believe in safety, at least not creatively. The Canadian filmmaker behind Evangeline, The Curse of Willow Song, Bring It On: Cheer or Die and […]

Karen Lam doesn’t believe in safety, at least not creatively. The Canadian filmmaker behind Evangeline, The Curse of Willow Song, Bring It On: Cheer or Die and Armageddon Road has built a career on finding beauty in discomfort and power in the uncanny. “People often think of horror as bloody or gory,” she says, “but that’s a very narrow industry definition.  Horror is a fear of the unknown, the dread at what lurks around the corner.  My job as a filmmaker is to lean into those dark shadows.”

Known for her genre-bending work that fuses horror, humor, and surrealism, Lam has also become a quiet mentor for actors and filmmakers navigating the post-pandemic creative landscape — an era defined by flux, independence, and reinvention. “We’re all living in horror right now,” she says with a laugh. “That’s why it’s such a relevant genre. We use horror as metaphor, to process reality in a way that gives meaning to the monstrous.”

The Language of Fear

Lam’s relationship with horror began early, long before she ever picked up a camera. “My dad took me to see Jaws when I was little,” she recalls.

“He thought it would be a good idea because I liked fish. I was probably petrified, but it set the foundation for my lifelong fascination with horror.”

That fascination with horror stories — and exploring the dark sides of human experience — became the foundation of her storytelling. “Fear and anger are foundational to human emotions,” she says. “When you look at the root of someone’s behavior, you’ll see that it is almost always a projection of their darkest emotions.  It drives so much of our public communications today.”

Lam does not direct her actors to act as if they’re in a horror film:  horror is less about how the person experiences it, but to the people watching. “The actors in my film aren’t in a horror film.  What happens to them is their real life.  I want them to be grounded in reality, even when things become uncanny or surreal.  I work very collaboratively so what the actors bring to the role are their real life experiences, their real reactions.  It’s up to me to create the points of tension or horror, mainly by where I place the camera or where I add elements of horror to their world.”

She points to Evangeline as an example: “The film is about the anger that drives someone to take revenge. Ultimately, if you allow anger over injustice to take over your consciousness, you become the very monster you were fighting. There’s no victory in surrendering to your inner darkness.”

When Darkness Becomes Satire

Yet there’s a darkly comic undercurrent to nearly everything Lam makes, even when audiences don’t immediately notice. “I often find horror funny,” she admits. “Probably because there’s something inherently amusing about someone making consistently bad decisions.”

Her short film The Meeting, about an AA group for serial killers, plays like a cross between The Office and Silence of the Lambs. “When I showed it at horror festivals, people laughed out loud. When I showed it at mainstream festivals, they sat there in stunned silence,” she says, smiling. “There’s a banality to the confessions that makes for deeply absurd comedy.



In reality, killers aren’t geniuses like Hannibal Lecter but much closer to doofuses like William H. Macy in Fargo.”

In fact, Lam’s deep admiration for the Coen Brothers influences her take on horror filmmaking. “Blood Simple is a perfect film,” she says. “It’s funny, it’s terrifying, it’s visually arresting.  You can literally feel the sweat in every frame.  And the characters are grounded.  Everyone is making the best decision they can, based on the limited amount of knowledge they have.  And then it all goes quite wrong.  It’s a black comedy of errors.”

For actors, she believes that the best performances are based on being true to the characters and situations.  “I’ve had the privilege of working on true crime documentary shows and what I can tell you is that if you were a funny person before you got kidnapped, you’re still a funny person while getting kidnapped.  You don’t suddenly turn into a Lifetime movie victim. I try to impart this onto my cast for every film I’m directing:  don’t react in an absurd or heightened way because you think it’s horror.  Be true to the character, even if it happens to be an impossible situation.”

Post-Production is the Secret Sauce

While most of the industry focuses on production, Lam stresses that the magic of story creation happens in post production. “Production is a bit like foraging,” she says.  “We’re gathering all the raw ingredients. Post-production is cooking.  It’s where the story all comes together, especially in genre filmmaking.”

She has worked with editor Jeannie Slater for years, and their collaboration is a key component to many of her films. “Jeanne reads the script but she’s not on set.  She works a lot in documentary so she’s used to dealing with a high shooting ratio.  We don’t do circle takes:  she looks over every piece of footage we’ve shot. 

I especially love handing over the material at the end of the production process and seeing her interpretation first,” she says. “After Jeanne’s first pass, we dive in and really start finding the nuances in the actors’ performances, and setting the rhythm and tone of the film.”

Lam’s filmmaking philosophy is deeply architectural — she builds mood, tension, and character through visuals, sound design and music. “The performances on set have an energy and life of their own, but we can shade those choices in post production,” she notes. “We find a glance, a breath, a laugh, sometimes even before or after we’re officially rolling.  We can build emotion by not cutting, or by using an effective music cue, thanks to my longtime music composer, Patric Caird.”  

Spaces That Remember

Lam often builds her stories around environments — homes, cities, or landscapes that carry emotional residue. “To me, horror exists in the real world,” she says. “It doesn’t need a haunted mansion or a torture chamber.  We can take everyday spaces and frame them in a way that conveys a sense of fear, or dread.”

In The Curse of Willow Song, she juxtaposed a deserted industrial warehouse against her protagonist’s internal imprisonment. “Even a vast open space can feel like a prison,” she explains. “My cinematographer Thomas Billingsley and I chose obstructed framing of Willow Song (Valerie Tian) so that visually, she was still incarcerated, despite being on parole.”

Lam never has a preconceived idea of blocking but allows the actors to react to the space in a way that feels natural. “It’s my job to find the right place to put the camera,” she says. “How a performer moves in a space is part of their character.  It’s up to me to find an angle that transforms the location into something deeply unsettling or uncanny.”

She adds with a grin, “I prefer to make a normal space feel creepy, rather than to location scout a creepy space.”

Identity, Representation, and the Uncomfortable Truth

Although Lam’s films focus primarily on thorny gender and political issues, she has felt a certain pressure to make films about the Asian community. But growing up in Manitoba, she says she didn’t even realize she was Chinese until she left home. “I was basically raised Mennonite,” she jokes. “It took me a long time to understand that they were trying to make me tell a certain kind of story, and for the most part, I rebelled.”

Apart from The Curse of Willow Song, her first feature with a predominantly Asian cast and her newest short film, Mrs. Chang’s Perfect Teeth, she has been reluctant about tackling Chinese themes in her films. “I have a complicated relationship with my culture, having been raised and assimilated with a rural Canadian upbringing,” she explains. “I can only tell stories that feel authentic to my experience.”

Her honesty extends to how she handles casting and historical accuracy, particularly in Armageddon Road. She cast actors Brian McCaig and co-star Natalie Grace to play the main characters in the darkly comedic, apocalyptic road movie set in 1970s Las Vegas. “Representation has to be truthful,” she says. “The story couldn’t have happened with diverse characters.  Steve (McCaig) would never have been released on early parole, and the police would have arrested them before the road trip even began.  We can’t fix history by pretending it was kinder than it was.”


For Lam, real diversity in filmmaking means complexity, not tokenism. “It’s about honouring real characters and exploring diversity — but only when it serves the story,” she says. “And if it’s through my lens, it’s going to make people feel quite uncomfortable.”

Filmmaking as an Act of Belief

More than any technical process, Lam says filmmaking is a matter of faith — not in institutions, but in the strange, personal logic that drives artists forward. “People are always going to tell you that what you’re doing is impossible,” she says. “But if you have your inner North Star, it’s the only thing that is going to truly guide you.”

That unflappable faith is the guiding principle in her career.  “If you don’t believe in what you’re making, no one else will,” she says. “You have to be willing to be weird, to risk being misunderstood. That’s the only way you can make something original.”

She references David Lynch as a kindred spirit: “Lynch never explained anything. He trusted his audience to find their own meaning. That’s what I want to do.  The best films should be a dialogue between the film and the audience.  What they think and their interpretations are just as valid as mine.”

The Future Belongs to the Unafraid

Looking ahead, Lam sees filmmaking entering a new phase:  one where risk, authenticity, and personal storytelling will define success far more than budgets or formulas. “There’s so much noise right now,” she says. “Everyone’s chasing trends. But what cuts through isn’t the latest sale:  It’s honesty and original thought.”

She encourages actors and filmmakers alike to focus on curiosity rather than validation. “Stop trying to be perfect,” she says. “Be curious. Be uncomfortable. Be interested in what scares you.”

That, she believes, is the heart of both horror and artistry. “The world’s already chaotic,” Lam says. “Your job as a filmmaker or actor is to be authentic to your own voice.  Everyone is trying so hard to be something else, to brand themselves as some other popular person or film. The only thing you have to offer the world is your true self. ”


Her voice softens for a moment, reflective. “Don’t be afraid to be misunderstood. The best stories (and people) always are.”

Karen Lam’s Closing Thought

“Filmmaking is an act of obsession,” she says. “It’s about chasing the things that won’t leave you alone — even if they scare you.”

To Lam, horror is not about violence or shock. It’s about acknowledging the truth to yourself:  to embrace fear, to delve deep into the unknown. “If your work makes people laugh, cry, and squirm in the same breath,” she says, “then you’re doing something right.”

And in an age of algorithms and noise, Karen Lam’s words echo like a challenge to every artist still willing to wander into the dark: “Be your weird self. That’s where the magic lives.”