In Shakespeare's language, violent or erotic tension is often associated with uncertain signifying marks and stains. Frequently these marks link together questions of interiority, destiny and futurity. This paper explores how Akira Kurosawa's film noir The Bad Sleep Well (1960) reworks the stains of Hamlet to explicate post-World War II Japanese corruption. In appropriating Hamlet's stains to cinematic technique, Kurosawa illustrates how modernity has perceived a reflection of its own epistemology in Shakespeare's language. Lacan's theory of the stain, and the related aesthetic theories of Heidegger, help in understanding the issues of futurity and representation that Kurosawa draws from Hamlet. More recently, Lee Edelman's queer reading of Hamlet exemplifies the way that Shakespeare continues to be a site of exploration in - and for - modernity. Edelman positions the play's futurity as a repressive defence against the queer. As a pre-emptive answer of sorts, Kurosawa's cinematography exemplifies the radically queer futures of Shakespeare's stains.