Kissed

Kissed (1996)

Love can leave you cold.

As a child, Sandra Larson was fixated on death. As a mortician, she discovers that her fixation goes beyond not just preparations and embalming, but into necrophilia. Medical student Matt has feelings for Sandra, but her taste in men is the barrier for their relationship.

Date of release
1996-09-07
TMDB
6.4 / 10 (87)
Runtime
1h 18m
Genres
Romance, Drama
Director
Lynne Stopkewich

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Filmed in: Vancouver

Kissed is a 1996 Canadian romantic/erotic drama film directed and co-written by Lynne Stopkewich, based on Barbara Gowdy's short story "We So Seldom Look on Love". It premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 7, 1996.

Production

Originally, director Lynne Stopkewich had no particular interest in death or necrophilia. However, an interview of Karen Greenlee, a young California woman caught in a necrophile act with a male cadaver in the late 1970s, got her attention.

She then contacted Gowdy, acquiring the option to the story for an undisclosed sum in May 1994. Stopkewich described her version as "an interpretation of the piece, not so much a literal translation", and stated that she did not include some details because of the film's low budget. Mainly, she omitted details about the main character's family and instead focused on her experiences as a child and young adult.

Generally, necrophiles most commonly present as single persons with an above-average IQ, a propensity for atypical belief systems, and who generally work in death-associated occupations. This is the inspiration behind the main character of the film, Sandra. Stopkewich expressed that she had never actually met a necrophile, nor did she research the topic extensively.

Her goal was to explore Sandra's "interior world" by focusing on the life experiences she had in common with the character—like growing up in the suburbs, burying dead animals, keeping secret objects hidden under the bed, disco dancing, facing one's mother after the first menstruation, dealing with questions of sex and death, one's first date, and one's first sexual experience.

Stopkewich started Kissed while studying film at University of British Columbia (UBC); the first draft was written by her in July 1994, and it was shown as her thesis project under the title Wide Awake: That Necrophile Movie to obtain a Master of Fine Arts degree, an honor which she acquired in 1996. As such, the film was self-funded, Stopkewich mostly used UBC's equipments and several crew members were film students.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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