Latest posts from National Screen Institute - Canada (NSI)

And They Watched

Posted: 10 Nov 2016 11:08 AM PST

A horror morality tale about a custodian of an electric chair.

The custodian, numb to the gruesome reality of his job, faces the specter of the chair’s last casualty. Inspired by the reinstatement of the electric chair in Tennessee, US.

Creative team

Writer/director: Vivian Lin
Co-producers: Jennifer Millington, Antonella LaCaprara, Vivian Lin

Filmmaker’s statement

It all started while I was reading random articles on the internet at night instead of sleeping.

I found this Tumblr of last statements of executed convicts. It was fascinating. It varied from messages of farewell, love for their families, some badass one-liners but, most haunting of all, emphatic statements of innocence.

That really stuck with me.

When it came time to write a horror film, that was the real-life horror that I drew from.

I wanted to see from the point-of-view of a person sitting in the electric chair. What we end up discovering is that regardless of whether you’re innocent or guilty, the chair is an equally terrifying place to be.

About Vivian Lin

Vivian Lin is a Toronto-based director, producer and writer.

In 2015, she was awarded Telefilm Canada’s New Voices Award for writing; her half-hour television pilot 100 Blackouts was a top 10 finalist in Final Draft’s Big Break Screenplay Competition and bronze prize recipient in the Page Awards.

She also launched Midnight Print Studios, a boutique soundstage with fully-loaded post-production facilities.

As a writer/director, her short film And They Watched, a horror morality tale, was an official selection of Sitges International Film Festival, Holly Shorts Film Festival, Mile High Horror Film Festival and more. It is part of the film anthology Fun Size Horror: Volume 2 and opened theatrically in the United States.

Her previous directing credits include Four Walls starring Nina Dobrev (Vampire Diaries) and Brendan Jeffers (Degrassi: TNG), and the comedy play The Mirror which premiered at the Montreal Fringe Festival.

She was previously a producer at Sarrazin Couture Entertainment where she associate produced the TV pilot Stay with Me, a $2.8 million legal drama starring Andrea Roth (Rescue Me) for CTV/Bell Media and is co-producing the feature film Four One Nine based on the Giller Prize-winning novel 419 by Will Ferguson, directed by Jeremy Podeswa (Game of Thrones).