Kissed is a 1996 Canadian romantic/erotic drama film[b] directed and co-written by Lynne Stopkewich, based on Barbara Gowdy's short story "We So Seldom Look on Love".

The film stars Molly Parker as Sandra Larson, a young woman whose fixation on death leads her to study embalming at a mortuary school, where in turn she finds herself drawn toward feelings of necrophilia.

Peter Outerbridge also stars as Matt, a fellow student who develops romantic feelings for Sandra, and so must learn to accept her sexual proclivities.

[14][16][4][7] The short story, itself inspired by the Greenlee's case, impacted Stopkewich because of its originality and non-judgmental tone, and it impressed her so much that it began to negatively affect her writing process.

[16] Stopkewich stated "We So Seldom Look on Love" was an ideal story for a low-budget adaptation because it only featured two main characters and had few locations.

[8] The desired 1970s-like setting also helped in decreasing production costs due to thrift shops and garage sale scenarios being cheaper than a "contemporary look".

[14][19] By introducing her through flashbacks as a young girl, Stopkewich desired to create sympathy for the character in order to make her socially inappropriate, taboo passions more acceptable by the audience.

[16] Stopkewich started Kissed while studying film at University of British Columbia (UBC);[1] the first draft was written by her in July 1994,[4][20] 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.

[16] Other crew included newcomer filmmakers such as Bruce Sweeney (whose debut Live Bait was in 1995) as boom operator, Gregory Wild (Highway of Heartache, 1994) contributing to the art direction, and her companion John Pozer as Foley artist.

[25] After receiving a $3,400 grant from UBC Film Department,[25][2] Stopkewich invested $36,000 of her own money[8] for a total of $80–100,000[4][7] raised with the help of co-producer Dean English, Pozer, family and friends.

[8] In 1995, after editing was finished on a Steenbeck machine in Pozer's mother basement,[7][8] the production team applied for a Canada Council Media Arts grant, which resulted in a $47–47,500 sum.

By chance, main actress Molly Parker was friend of the film's cinematographer Gregory Middleton[7] and wanted to meet Stopkewich because she had never seen a woman director.

[4] For Outerbridge's part as Matt, Stopkewich appreciated Fraser's help since the story was written and directed from a woman's point of view.

[31][c] The director also said she was confronted by people angry "with the fact we've created this character who is totally inaccessible from a male, heterosexual standpoint",[23] and commented Sandra's sexual acts were not phallocentric.

[33] Lee Parpart, writing in The Gendered Screen: Canadian Women Filmmakers, commented that Kissed features "contradictory impulses" in the simultaneous wish to have the audience sympathy and to keep them out of their comfort zone that make difficult to say if it is or not a feminist film.

[34] On one hand, Stopkewich called Kissed "the Disney version of a film about necrophilia", which Parpart agreed when she analyzed the different portrayal Sandra had in Gowdy's short story.

[e] On the other hand, Parpart observed the film had a modernist desire to provide audience with intellectual discomfort as evidenced by Stopkewich's use of white light to constrain walking out people.

[17][40] Sandra's necrophile acts are the moments in which fog filters are used to create a "spirit-filled glow or 'aura' around the characters" that "intensify the lyrical, dream-like quality of 'crossing over'", as described by Paakspuu.

[40] Lee Parpart argued that the use of fog filters, halo effects, beloweye-line shots, and the white light made Kissed into a film that "sells its blood-loving lead character as a sensitive figure whose stated motivation for sleeping with dead bodies ... becomes all the more believable and acceptable because she is lit and shot in a way that lends her a kind of otherworldly beauty and innocence".

[36] Paakspuu noted Stopkewich created a moral dichotomy through her symbolic use of lights, colour palette, scenarios, and sounds in the film.

[19] Specific camera movement—swooping, spinning, and soaring—was also singled by Paakspuu because she considered it helped to contrast her necrophile acts as moments of "heightened sense of euphoria" in opposition to daily activities.

[57] The New York Times noted that "it would be easy to snicker at this Canadian film, were its subject not handled with a delicacy and lyricism that underscore the mystical rather than gruesome aspects of what Sandra cooly acknowledges is a consuming addiction".

Club stated that "There's much of interest here, and though it's rare and refreshing to find a film that genuinely tries to address the subject of death directly, Kissed is likely to leave its audience as cold as the objects of its heroine's desire".

[58] "The Kissed hype", as described Playback, resulted in a month-long tour by Stopkewich in the United States, where she and Parker signed to the William Morris Agency.

[61][62] After receiving critical acclaim, she appeared in Variety's cover, and attracted the attention of several directors and producers, including British Michael Winterbottom (Wonderland, 1999), Hungarian István Szabó (Sunshine, 1999), and American Jodie Foster (Waking the Dead, 2000).

[52][63] Along with Atom Egoyan's 1994 Exotica and David Cronenberg's 1996 Crash, Kissed helped the Canadian film industry to acquire international notoriety.