Alix Turner
Last week, on the eve of the Lunar New Year, I had the pleasure of talking with Brando Lee, director and co-writer of Don’t Look at the Demon. Don’t Look at the Demon (known as The Medium in the UK) is a gripping supernatural thriller that combines a possession story with mystery and gruesome customs, and is set in beautiful Malaysia. Brando wrote the story with Alfie Palermo and I started by asking him about that partnership.
“I’m wearing the t-shirt now from our previous film,” he said, referring to Gangster Wars, or Kisah Paling Gengster, as it said on the t-shirt. “I felt quite comfortable working with Alfie, although he is a Muslim and I am Chinese, a non-Muslim; we’re friends and got on well. At the time when I thought ‘I’ve got to do a horror movie’ (which I’d never done before), I met up with Alfie and we got together many times to go through ideas; eventually, I decided to go with the traditional folklore of Thailand, something from southeast Asia and with many westerners never seen before. Of course, here, locally in Malaysia, we have seen folklore from this region, so I thought about a story in which I get a bunch of westerners coming over to have a look at what’s going on here. That’s how the whole idea came about.
“Working with Alfie was great,” Brando continued. “We both basically pitched a lot of ideas along the way. Every five pages he wrote, we met up: that’s how we collaborated. From the five pages I read through, I told him if he was on the right track or not, and what to change; he would throw in more ideas to surprise me sometimes. It took us three to five months until the day we got it to pre-production; I was doing location scouting at the same time. Eventually, I found this huge mansion, a wonderful place for the horror film; no one had touched it before, so I brought him along during the first round of recceing and talked to him about the blocking and stuff like that. Immediately, we amended the story here and there, added in stuff, based on the real locations and layouts. Then in the second round of recceing with the technical team, my DP, and so on; Alfie would tag along, listen to our conversations and I would brief him as well about edits and things that would need adding in. So the collaboration continued right up to production, very lengthy collaboration for a small film like this.”
As Brando had mentioned working with Alfie on Gangster Wars, I asked what had prompted his move genres from action to horror. “I am a person who does not want to get stuck in one particular genre,” Brando said. “I like to explore: I get myself bored if I stick to one thing. Before the gangster film, I made another one, a suspense-love-story in Cambodia, so horror was one genre I’d not touched yet. After the gangster film, I did a comedy in Hong Kong with Steven Chow. So there were a couple of others before I wanted to branch out into horror… that was a key reason, but also my childhood experience.
“When I was maybe seven years old, I experienced something that is unforgettable. With my parents, we visited a witch doctor in a local Siamese temple, because we had been ‘black magicked’ by a neighbor according to some medium who can convey what he felt and saw in our house. He saw spirits there in the house, and we felt pain; for me, it was aches in my body, on my knees, even as a young child. But for my parents, especially my late father, it was worse; my older sisters experienced the same things too. So we visited the witch doctor and had him fix us, in a way. It’s kind of ridiculous, but some horror fans in the west will like the witch doctor’s way of exorcising things, expelling the curse. That kind of inspired me a lot. The moment the horror genre came to my mind, that experience which had lingered a long time in myself came to mind too: I had to use elements of those memories in my story and expand from there. So when I talked to Alfie about this, he thought it would be great; we were exploring different countries’ perspectives of black magic folklore. We found it very interesting to look back on these rituals; he’s a Muslim and I’m a Buddhist, but the rituals had nothing to do with religion, but black magic and traditional healing.”
I wondered what did Brando think had really happened back then when he was a child? “We were cursed,” he said. “We were cursed by our neighbor because of business jealousy, stuff like that.”
I was curious also about the good luck tattoos that featured in Don’t Look at the Demon, and asked Brando whether they were an authentic custom from Malaysia. “It’s very authentic,” he said. “When we did the first round of production design and scouting, getting more ideas in Thailand, I flew in my American production designer (who I’d known for years, from when I was studying film in the States). He came with me and we explored a Thai temple, talked to some Thai monks, then one of the rituals they introduced to us was a tattoo on someone’s back as a protection symbol; that was in a small rural place about an hour’s drive from Bangkok.”
The other ritual in the film—which viewers are warned about at the start—is called Kuman Thong and involves stillborn babies. “That’s real,” Brando confirmed, “and thankfully it’s been banned.”
The film’s story involved an American cast and crew though was filmed in Thailand and Malaysia. I asked Brando what the logistics had been like. “A lot of traveling for them,” he said. “We had to film the temple scene at the start of the film in northern Malaysia, at the border with Thailand. We flew the cast there, a special treat for them. Flying from across the globe was actually a first for most of them; none of them had been to this part of the world. Fiona Dourif [who played Jules, the medium] told me her only visit to Asia had been to Japan, and the rest hadn’t been here. Malin Crépin from Sweden, William Miller {you might have seen him in Netflix’s Warrior Nun), all of them came over here and worked with local people. The scene with the young Jules and her mom at the start of the film was made in the States, but the rest here in Malaysia and the bottom of Thailand.”
I have interviewed filmmakers from a range of countries by now, but Brando is the first from Malaysia, and Don’t Look at the Demon is the first Malaysian horror film I’ve seen. I asked him if there is another example he could recommend. “You can check out Munafik,” he said. “It’s a Muslim word and the film is famous, locally; and I think it shows on Netflix, along with part 2.”
Back to Brando’s own film, which was full of special effects and stunts you’d associate with a possession film. I pondered that a filmmaker has to choose between presenting such things with subtlety or full-on, The Exorcist-style, and I asked him how such a decision is made. “First of all, I was very much inspired by The Exorcist,” Brando said with a laugh. “I watched it when I was quite young and then didn’t see it again until I got to the States to study film, so it got into my mind. It was definitely an inspiration, along with memories from my childhood. I do get bored by slow-burn films sometimes, sorry to say that, and so I like faster-paced ones. Sure, I watched Jackie Chan, growing up in Asia, and of course, I love Jaws, Star Wars, and so on. To me, it’s crucial that my audience must not get bored! Not to say I did it on purpose as such, but the styles I used in the film were very much relevant to the subject matter I wanted to present. Of course, I’ve seen a lot of slower horror films, but I wanted to tell something more aggressive, and in a shorter period, and I really can’t recall the last horror film I saw that’s really fast-paced. So I made it that way!”
Although I had arranged to speak to director Brando Lee, another name showed against his face on my Zoom screen: Cha Fung Lee, which he told me is his real name. As it happens, Don’t Look at the Demon also has another name (at least in the UK): The Medium. “The Medium was a working title, really,” he told me, “and I never changed it for many years. I remember there was a horror film festival in Manchester that wanted to pick up the film in 2020, but my investors at that time didn’t agree: they felt it wasn’t quite ready and we shouldn’t show it to anyone just then. I had to comply, and there really were some things I wanted to do with it, like tweaking the color here and there. In 2021, there was a Thai film called The Medium, and that had a Thai name originally, but they renamed it for commercial reasons. So I changed the title of my film, but the UK already knew it as The Medium.”
Now, Don’t Look at the Demon has recently reached wide release in a number of countries around the world. “I think it’s been received positively,” Brando said. “I think it will be in Europe soon, and it will have a theatrical release in Latin America. So far, it’s good. We’re trying to get it into Indonesia soon.”
I was naturally intrigued to find out what Brando has lined up next. “Next, I’m making a Mandarin film, in China,” he said, “specifically for China, but it will be brought to the rest of the world too. It’s a love fantasy/drama story, another genre. Then I’ll go back to horror, with an Indonesian partner.”
Don’t Look at the Demon is now available on iTunes, Prime Video, VUDU, Google Play, and on DVD.
If you enjoyed this interview, be sure to check these out too!
Huesera: An Interview with Director Michelle Garza Cervera and Actress Natalia Solián
The Apology: An Interview With Writer/Director Alison Star Locke
Scare Package II: Rad Chad’s Revenge, an Interview With the Team
