LOS ANGELES – The Malaysian body-horror film Tiger Stripes – the first South-east Asian movie to win the Critics’ Week Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival – pays homage to 1950s horror flicks as well as the bizarre creatures of Malay folklore.

And its writer-director Amanda Nell Eu – the first Malaysian female director to screen a feature at Cannes – discovered her three young lead actresses by scouring Instagram and TikTok at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Eu’s debut feature wowed the judges at the 62nd Critics’ Week in 2023, an event held in parallel to the main festival at Cannes and dedicated to first or second films.

Premiering on Netflix on Feb 15, the movie – which opened in Singapore cinemas in December 2023 – is set at an all-girls school in rural Malaysia and stars newcomer Zafreen Zairizal as Zaffan, a 12-year-old who is the first of her friends to hit puberty and get her period.

But on top of the usual physical changes, she also begins to sprout whiskers and claws as part of a terrifying transformation she initially tries to hide.

Speaking at a screening of Tiger Stripes in Los Angeles in late 2023, Eu, 38, says Zaffan’s metamorphosis was inspired by her two pet cats.

“I love cats so much because they are just sassy little b****es who can do whatever they want, and I want to be like that.

“I remember telling the film’s make-up artist what my cat – who is a Sphynx cat with no hair – looks like. And that Zaffan’s tail should look like this.”

Eu’s kitties also made a more direct contribution to the movie, an international production involving eight countries including Singapore, which provided a portion of the funding through the Singapore Film Commission.

“There’s a scene where Zaffan is pulling out whiskers from her upper lip, and we couldn’t find the right texture, whether it was with a paint brush or by using wires, so I was, like, ‘Let me collect my cats’ whiskers.’

“And we used real cats’ whiskers because that was what looked best for the film,” says Eu, who was born in Kuala Lumpur and educated in England.

She also made a point of using practical effects, rather than computer-generated imagery, wherever possible.

“I grew up watching black-and-white horror films from the 1950s, and this was something I wanted to pay homage to,” says Eu, a fan of Malaysian B-movies from that era. “So it was mainly practical effects, and effects that weren’t so smooth or slick.”

This served the tone she was going for.

“In the culture of Malaysia, we have bizarre creatures (in our folklore), and I wanted to have that effect where it was kind of gnarly.”

Eu’s ongoing fascination with the notion of “women being monsters in society” also informed the story.

“Because we still are viewed as monsters sometimes when we are outside the box,” she says.

This was a theme in her 2017 Malay-language short film It’s Easier To Raise Cattle, which competed at the Venice International Film Festival and featured a pontianak, a vampiric female creature from Malay mythology.

But to ground these fantastical ideas, it was essential to find the right actresses, and for Tiger Stripes, Eu cast the net wide.

“We started casting in 2020 and we wanted to do this open casting with a lot of schools. But schools weren’t open at the time, so we started looking at Instagram and TikTok, and that’s where we found a lot of the girls.

“We met about 200 girls and then whittled it down to about 30,” says Eu. And that was how she eventually found the three who would play Zaffan and her two friends Farah (Deena Ezral) and Mariam (Piqa).

“We did many acting workshops with them to create a space where they could express themselves totally freely and feel very safe in everything they want to do.

“Which is exactly what the film is fighting for, so it’s kind of nice to see that happen off and on set,” Eu says.

• Tiger Stripes premieres on Netflix on Feb 15.