Karen Lam has been one of Hollywood North’s favourite filmmakers. She had some great insight back in the Fall of 2023 for the Backbench live Podcast live at the Rio. Over a year ago, Hollywood North staff writer Owen Pham spoke with Karen about Armageddon Road when it was in post-production. Audiences in Vancouver were finally able to see this epic, fun movie at the Rio on August 5th.
We had a conversation with Karen Lam about her career, Canadian film policies, and Armageddon Road.
HNMAG: Three years ago, you were on the panel at the Rio for a discussion about Bill C 11.
Karen Lam: Absolutely. That was for Canada Land.
HNMAG: You also had a conversation with Hollywood North a year ago about Armageddon Road.
Karen Lam: Yes, we were in post-production, which felt like forever ago!
HNMAG: It’s not easy.
Karen Lam: You have no idea that you’re going to sign up for a 14-year plight, but yes. Not easy.
HNMAG: That’s film, especially with a lower budget. You grew up in the prairies?
Karen Lam: I did; I grew up in Brandon, Manitoba. What was really cool about Brandon was that we had a little university. Brandon University, which is where my father taught.
HNMAG: Wow.
Karen Lam: We actually had Sunday evening movies, and we had a really good film professor at the time, Dr. James Skinner. He actually had a huge collection of 35 mm films, and he would show us the classics every Sunday night.
HNMAG: This is even when you were in high school?
Karen Lam: Yeah, in high school and in university, but definitely in high school already. We were watching some fairly unique movies. Freaks, John Waters’ Female Trouble. That traumatized me for life. I remember seeing Eraserhead. It was something getting to see these arthouse and really obscure films that really shaped my growing up.
That’s what informs you as a filmgoer and hopefully expands your cinematic understanding and your knowledge.
HNMAG: Did you attend Brandon University?
Karen Lam: I did my first degree in English literature. I have a Bachelor of Arts from Brandon University — I minored in Music and World Religion.
HNMAG: Where did you go to law school?
Karen Lam: I went to law school at UBC.
HNMAG: Okay, that’s why you came to Vancouver, to study at UBC.
Karen Lam: Yeah. I had one brief detour where I went to what is now Metropolitan University in Toronto for a year, and that was in fashion design, but I’m a fashion school dropout.
HNMAG: Similar to Frenchy in Grease, but that was a Beauty School.
Karen Lam: No graduation day for me either. So it was UBC after that.
HNMAG: Did you practice law in Vancouver for a while after that?
Karen Lam: I articled in insurance law, and then I ended up working at what is now Creative BC, but at the time it was British Columbia Film. I started as an intern there for twenty weeks, and then they offered me an in-house legal position. That’s my foray into film.
HNMAG: Okay.
Karen Lam: I started in business affairs, and then I started producing.
HNMAG: That makes sense. You had that law business background, and that led you to the producing side and then eventually to directing.
Karen Lam: Yes.
HNMAG: Did you direct a short to begin with or did you go right into a feature?
Karen Lam: A short film, for sure. I was producing short films first.
Then I moved into a TV series for the Comedy Network, and then I did my first three-country, tripartite, Canada, US, and South Africa, co-production as a feature.
HNMAG: Sounds complicated.
Karen Lam: I was doing feature films, and I was quite happy until one year. I think all my projects blew up, and then I, in a panic, wrote a short film, because I thought I could use it as a calling card, and I applied to the National Screen Institute. I won the NSI drama prize.
HNMAG: Congrats!
Karen Lam: I got the drama prize for a short horror, and that’s where my foray into writing and directing began. I made ten short films and four feature films before my fifth feature, Armageddon Road.
HNMAG: What was the comedy series you were working on initially?
Karen Lam: It was called The Unprofessionals.
HNMAG: That sounds good.
Karen Lam: It wasn’t, but you know I learned a lot. It was thirteen episodes, and it was quite low budget and uh, yeah, it was a crash course in production.
HNMAG: Financed by the Comedy Network.
Karen Lam: Yes, at that time, it was the Comedy Network. But what I was really interested in was a specific type of horror which was inspired by Asian horror. I love that style, and I couldn’t find anyone to make it. I had a few scripts as a producer I had been developing, and I wasn’t finding anyone to capture that tone, so I wrote a short film called The Cabinet, and it starred Sonya Bennett. It was written basically as a take on the fairy tale Bluebeard, but modernized. It was shot on Super 16. It was well reviewed. I didn’t realize there was a whole network for women and horror, and they reached out. It was called Etheria. It’s a female- focused short horror film festival. They reviewed my short film, and I found welcoming arms in this whole network of female filmmakers who specialize in horror.
HNMAG: You’ve made a career out of that. So amazing!
Karen Lam: You can’t just do it if you don’t love it. It doesn’t work as a career stepping stone. It has to be something that you love.
HNMAG: Yeah, you gotta have that passion.
Karen Lam: I remember when I eventually started taking some extra training through the Women in the Director’s Chair program when it was at the Banff Center for the Arts. At that point, our directing mentor, Kari Skogland, was telling me not to get stuck in horror. She thought that I was making horror films in order to be a stepping stone, before making “prestige drama.” After the course was over, and after she saw what I was doing, she said, “Oh! You actually like this.”
HNMAG: A lot of people, especially young directors, gravitate towards horror because it’s popular and something you can do on a lower budget. It doesn’t require the star system to drive it because it already has that built- in genre audience.
Karen Lam: Yes, absolutely. I understand it might work as a good stepping stone to show that you can direct and then later on, they tell you, “Let’s move on to something more highbrow.” I never wanted to “move on.”
HNMAG: You just love that genre. That’s your driving force.
Karen Lam: I love horror, and I actually think that there’s so much more room for us to expand and to push the edges of what we consider horror. Fantastic film, genre film. I think that with Armageddon Road. It’s very much what they considered weird cinema. It’s closer to “weird” and “cult” rather than straight horror, but there’s always been room for that in fantastic film. Like when I look at my favorite directors, they were never straight horror.
HNMAG: It seems like a thriller; it doesn’t really come off as horror, even though there are supernatural elements to it.
Karen Lam: It’s got that dark comedy-ish feel. It’s not meant to be deadly serious. I mean, you’ve got miniatures. It’s not going to be deadly serious except for our poor characters. They think it’s deadly serious, but we’re having a little bit of a chuckle.
HNMAG: To follow up on the panel from three years ago at the Rio theatre, have we seen any significance from Bill C 11 in terms of funding?
Karen Lam: No. I can’t say for sure in the television space, but I can say that in feature film, we don’t see any of that funding. In fact, what’s disturbing is the fact that we’re not seeing any of the US streamers actually pay their share. We’re letting them off the hook while they take our revenues and our audiences.
As much as I really agree with a lot of what’s happening with our new government, they’re not looking at the domestic film industry with that same level of protection that we actually need. We’ve already given up so many of our screens, and our eyeballs, essentially, to chase this production service model that’s not actually stable or sustainable.
HNMAG: Was the screening at the Rio for Armageddon Road the first public screening?
Karen Lam: We had a sneak preview in the Vancouver Horror Show last October, but we weren’t quite done.
HNMAG: Okay.
Karen Lam: That was really lovely because we had a little sneak. We had some fantastic feedback from that, but our official world premiere was actually, of all places, at the Fantaspoa Film Festival in Porto Alegre, Brazil. That was in April, and it was amazing to actually watch the film, which is very, very dialogue-driven with Portuguese subtitles and having the audience really respond. That was a delightful surprise.
HNMAG: Armageddon Road was completed in 2026, but it’s set in Las Vegas in 1976. It’s fifty years later, but the end-of-times circumstances are just as relevant.
Karen Lam: Things have come up while making this movie. We had never been in a pandemic, and so 2020 hits, and it changed the world. When I finally got to make Armageddon Road, basically ten years after I wrote it. I thought the worst that could happen would be pestilence. Who knew that war and famine and other forms of death would be just around the corner?
HNMAG: Right.
Karen Lam: When we filmed in 2024, there was no sense that this is where things were going to be, and I remember having to explain to my crew that there was this Middle East oil embargo during the 1970s.
HNMAG: One of the main reasons the world went from Carter to Reagan.
Karen Lam: They had just come out of the Vietnam War, Nixon was impeached, and there was a sense of both hope but also disillusionment. In the 1970s, in some ways, it was supposed to be like a sense of how far we’ve come. There are a lot of old wounds that have never healed.
When you look at the election results map, it’s pretty well along the lines of the Confederacy. If you consider Reconstruction after the Civil War and all of that, and thinking, they have never healed properly. They just tried to brush it under the rug. These conflicts keep coming up again and again. Every cycle just continues. Maybe this is our fifty-year cycle where it all comes back.
HNMAG: Where can we see Armageddon Road in the theatres soon?
Karen Lam: We will be at the Revue Cinema in Toronto for September 3rd and 4th. We should have a few more bookings after that as well. The Armageddon Cross-Canada Road Trip!
HNMAG: Are you working on another feature after this?
Karen Lam: I have a full novel written.
HNMAG: Wow.
Karen Lam: It’s called M1A, She is essentially a malfunctioning sex bot, but yes, it’s actually based on an unpublished novel that I wrote a few years ago.
I got a pitch deck now, and an outline, but what I really do need is the mental space to sit down and adapt it to a full screenplay.
HNMAG: Where is M1A set?
Karen Lam: Vancouver.
HNMAG: Terrific, then we will have something to show the world how beautiful our city is.
Karen Lam: Absolutely, but from a dysfunctional perspective.
Of course, we would expect nothing less.
Karen accompanied a small crew in 2024 for a location shoot in Las Vegas. They stayed in a haunted hotel.
It’s the Apache in Fremont, and it’s renowned for its ghosts. Her room refused to let her in: They gave Karen the electronic key, and it kept flashing yellow until she had to change rooms. Each room that has experienced hauntings literally has a little sign on the door to mark what kind of hauntings were reported.
Here is the Room Key:
Karen Lam is a wonderful, experienced filmmaker. She does tremendous work as a Vancouver industry professional, and she has a fun and specific point of view. Armageddon Road is a great ride and worth getting on board. We are really looking forward to M1A. Vancouver needs a sexbot wreaking havoc on an unsuspecting populace.