Production Notes

My love affair with the horror genre began when I was a seven-year-old kid living in Taiwan. On one particular delivery trip, the video rental guy brought a pirated VHS copy of cartoons. My cousin, my sister and I popped the tape in fully expecting Bugs Bunny or Tom and Jerry. Instead, we got Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining". The film was not dubbed but subtitled in Chinese. At the time, my Chinese writing vocabulary was pretty limited so I didn't understand much of the dialogue – but I understood enough to feel completely creeped out. That's when I realized I love being scared.

With “Aunt Tigress” I wanted do something eerie, dark and creepy – the way I remembered it when I first heard the fable in an audio book of Chinese folktales. (In fact, the tale frightened me so much that I refused to touch the tape cassette.) I wanted to keep the fairy-tale feel but still have everything as close to real-life as possible. That’s why it was important that the monster doesn’t fully turn into a tiger in the end as in the fable.

Wei Ling Chang
Director